According to DisplaySearch, the global OLED capacity share of Taiwanese vendors was 44% in the fourth quarter of 2004. RiTdisplay, a major OLED supplier in Taiwan, believes the total shipment volume from Taiwanese OLED vendors may exceed those from Korea and Japan, making Taiwan worldwide number one in 2005.

There are around five Taiwanese vendors mass producing OLED products at present, including RiTdisplay, AU Optronics (AUO), teco Optronics, Lightronik and Univision Technology. Except for AUO, these companies are all solely devoted to the manufacturing of OLED products. According to RiTdisplay, its shipment volume in the fourth quarter of 2004 reached 29.3% in terms of worldwide market share, which exceeded Samsung's 25.1% share and made it the worldwide No. 1 OLED supplier. As for the first quarter of 2005, RiTdisplay remained number one in terms of worldwide market share with 29.5% compared with Samsung's 28.3%.

DC Wang, president and CEO of RiTdisplay, said that the company started to deliver its 1.5-inch full color OLED product in March, and expects total shipment volume may exceed 5 million pieces in 2005. RiTdisplay mainly focuses on MP3 and cell phone applications at present, and the shipment volume for each application is expected to be fifty-fifty this year.

"There is an increasing number of MP3 makers adopting OLED displays, and we expected the adoption of OLED in MP3 devices will keep growing rapidly this year," said Wang. "At the same time, there is also a trend for high-end cell phones to adopt full color OLED as their main display recently."

Both area color and full color OLED products from RiTdisplay use passive-matrix (PM) driving technology at present. However, Wang indicated that the company will start to deliver its active-matrix (AM) OLED product in small volume within this year, and will focus on a 2.2-inch full color product.

AMOLED

As did Samsung, RiTdisplay adopted a-Si TFT technology to develop its AMOLED product. The company believes a-Si technology offers better performance than LTPS; the size of the substrate is another consideration. "When FPD TV happens to be one of the applications of AMOLED, the size of LTPS substrate will become a great limitation in product development. Since the largest LTPS panel available nowadays is only around 20-inch," said Yih Chang, general manager of RiTdisplay.

AUO also plans to deliver its AMOLED products this year. As the largest TFT-LCD panel maker in Taiwan, AUO possesses both a-Si TFT and LTPS-TFT technologies. Alan Lien, director of AVBU indicated that the company started mass delivery of its LTPS TFT-LCD panel last year, at 2.5-inch and below.

Besides having successfully demonstrated the world's first full color AMOLED based on a-Si TFT, AUO is also the only company to have successfully integrated OLED into LTPS and a-Si TFT technologies. The company launched the world's first double-sided AMOLED last October, which is capable of simultaneously displaying two different images.

According to Lien, AUO plans to mass deliver its AMOLED products in the second quarter of this year, and will focus on 3G handset and DSC applications at the beginning stage.

"Our AMOLED products will be based on LTPS-TFT in the early stage, since we believe LTPS is currently more stable. In addition, there is no need for us to worry about the source of LTPS panel, and it is supposed to be our competitive edge in the market," said Lien. He stressed that AMOLED is one of AUO's technology development focuses. Although it cannot control market demand, it has to make sure its technology is ready for this market.  

Singapore-based Innoled, a licensee of Cambridge Display Technology’s light-emitting polymer technology, is set to commence pilot runs of its OLED production line next month. According to Peter Karlsson, Innoleds's Managing Director, pilot production will take place in The Netherlands at the facilities of Innoled's display equipment provider, OTB Engineering.

“The pilot production will aim to improve yield from the processes, and produce some engineering samples for our customers,” said Karlsson. "We want to ensure that we have sorted out the yield before we move the production line to Singapore.”

The company plans to start commercial production in Singapore by the end of this year, Karlsson added. The products will be marketed under the Nuovio brand name.

At full capacity, with a tack time of about 2 minutes and using a 14 x 14 –inch glass substrate, the line should be able to produce about 1.5 million hand-phone displays. Starting with 1.7-inch monochrome displays with a resolution of 128 x 64 pixels, Innoled plans to make active matrix full colour displays by 2007.

Karlsson predicts that 2005/2006 will see the commercial breakthrough for OLEDs. “The second half of last year witnessed lots of MP3 players coming out with OLED displays, and many more applications are beginning to use OLEDs,” he said.

“A lot of work is being done to improve the energy efficiency and the lifetime of the display, but it will be some time before we can see OLED displays for televisions or computers. The automotive sector will be a big market in the future, not only because of the higher brightness that OLEDs offer, but also due to the ability to withstand temperature variations, especially the cold.”

Innoled is a joint-venture between Eastgate Technology and Inline Display Technologies Europe BV of The Netherlands, with Eastgate holding a 70 percent stake. The fledgling unit received about $7.5 million in funding from a local financial institution in November last year.

Typical OLED devices consist of several thin layers of various emissive and charge transport materials constructed on transparent substrates. The U.S. Department of Energy has stated that "to realize the full potential of OLED technology, new materials and systems are needed that offer vastly improved efficiency and stability in the active regions of the device: cathode and anode layers, electron and hole transport and injection layers, emission layers, and carrier blocking layers."

The Dow Corning project will address these challenges, in that new HIM systems will be developed to overcome processing and performance problems associated with conventional HIMs while maintaining or enhancing the desired properties, such as OLED brightness, efficiency and lifetime.

OLEDs will enable the production of rugged, super-thin and lightweight high-resolution displays with wide viewing angles and quick response times—giving them a potential competitive market advantage over liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and other FPD technologies, Dow representatives said.

"Currently available hole injection and transport materials and their processing do not provide the ideal solution for use in OLEDs, especially polymer-based OLEDS," stated Carl Bilgrien, Dow Corning's Manager of Display Technology. "Consequently, Dow Corning is pleased to receive a USDC R&D contract that will stimulate the development of improved material systems and process technology to strengthen the nascent OLED industry."

The USDC-funded project will be undertaken in two phases, with the second phase focused on the application of Dow Corning's improved HIM using inkjet printing or other patterning techniques.

The USDC program is a partnership between the U.S. Army Research Lab (ARL), based in Adelphi, Maryland, and private industry.

Nuelight (Santa Clara, Calif.) plans to invest about $3 million in this center, which will have 50 engineers, the company said here on Thursday (May 5). The company also plans to implement analog design and IC product design capability here.

Nuelight has a patent pending display technology that ensures uniform brightness, balanced colors and longer lifetimes, enabling OLED display makers to develop high-resolution displays for smart phones, portable DVD players, laptops, monitors and television sets. The company considered Bangalore and Chennai before deciding to locate in Hyderabad, said Damoder Reddy, chairman, chief executive, and founder of Nuelight.

"We have chalked out very aggressive growth plans for our Hyderabad center as it will play a key role in product development for our very high volume customers," added Edward Naugler Jr., chief technical officer and co-founder of Nuelight.

CDT (Cambridge, England) said it wants to establish a syndicate of select display companies to work on the project. Syndicate members would share both the costs and the benefits of the display research, CDT said. A lead customer — identified only as a major Asian display company — has been signed up, CDT said.

CDT did not say how many companies it expected to work with, or when the formation of the syndicate would be completed.

Development of top-emitting, active-matrix displays is an important step in the commercialization of OLED technology, CDT said. The benefits of improved system lifetime and superior display performance are expected to accelerate use of OLED technology into large panel applications such as televisions and computer monitors. Top-emitting structures are expected to be compatible with both amorphous silicon and low-temperature polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistors.

While based on polymer materials, the program is expected to be applicable to dendrimer and small molecule OLEDs, CDT said. As part of the program, CDT will install a new deposition tool in its engineering building in Cambridge.  

Vision, a US-based developer of emissive polymer technology, and loans of
$1.3 million to Litrex.
The Company's cash and cash equivalents were $18.2 million at March 31,
2005, compared with $26.9 million at December 31, 2004.
CEO Dr. David Fyfe comments: "We are pleased with the progress being made
in our strategy of gaining the interest and commitment of display producers
for our P-OLED technology. The display industry requires substrates larger
than the current Gen 2/2.5 prevalent for OLED manufacture (to produce larger
displays and for economical reasons), and our belief that P-OLEDs represent
the most scaleable OLED technology is gaining more widespread industry
acceptance. We continue to expect strong revenue growth in 2005."
The Company will be holding a conference call to discuss these results.
Interested investors may listen to a live web cast on Monday, May 9, 2005 at
10:00 ET, 15:00 BST. This call can be accessed through the internet at
http://www.earnings.com.
The financial results included in this press release are unaudited, and
will be included in the Company's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q to be filed
with the SEC.

On the occasion of the 35th anniversary, which falls today, the world¡¯s largest maker of plasma display panels (PDPs) said yesterday it will go all-out to dominate the PDP, cathode ray tube (CRT) and organic light emitting diode (OLED) segments of the global display market in the near future.

``2005 will be a turning point for Samsung SDI in reaffirming our strong commitment to becoming a global display maker and clarifying our direction toward the goal. We will start afresh,¡¯¡¯ Samsung SDI chief executive Kim Soon-taek said.

He stressed that the company should focus on drawing up measures to integrate its scattered capacity and fostering business operations into world-class level by mobilizing employees¡¯ creative mind, pioneering spirit and insight.

``Let¡¯s spearhead the global display industry by creating new products for our flagship businesses, including the Braun tube, through a paradigm shift and strengthening our technological prowess and the overall competitiveness of next-generation industries such as PDP, OLED and rechargeable batteries,¡¯¡¯ Kim urged his employees.

Samsung SDI last year announced its long-term goal of realizing 3 trillion won in pretax profit on annual sales of 20 trillion won by 2010. It expects to sell 1.7 million panels this year.

Since it began making PDPs in 2001 in Chonan, South Chungchong Province, Samsung SDI¡¯s sales of the PDP modules have grown an average of 535 percent a year, to 870,000 units last year, representing 25 percent of global supply.

The company developed the world¡¯s largest 102-inch high-definition PDP last December and the world¡¯s slimmest, 35-centimeter-thick, flat-panel CRT display for digital televisions last July.

However, Samsung SDI¡¯s net profit tumbled 77 percent to 54.1 billion won in the first quarter this year from 230.8 billion won a year earlier due declining panel prices and the higher won value hurting export profitability. Sales dipped 16 percent to 1.86 trillion won from 2.22 trillion won.

In the first quarter, Samsung SDI sold 15.2 million CRTs worth 780 billion won, down from 1.04 trillion won in the fourth quarter last year. Sales of plasma display panels amounted to 373 billion won and sales of rechargeable batteries totaled 118 billion won.

Roughly 85 percent of Samsung SDI¡¯s overall sales are derived from exports.

Despite adverse export environment, Samsung SDI predicts even faster growth and forecasts sales of 7.2 million plasma units this year.

Samsung SDI anticipates the global PDP market to rebound in the second half as falling prices generally spur sales. The company predicts that the prices of mainstay 42-inch high-definition PDP televisions will fall to around $2,000 this year, down from $4,000 last year.

While Samsung SDI said currency fluctuations, higher oil and raw material costs pose risks for the remainder of the year, it will take steps to lower production costs, invest aggressively in high value-added next-generation businesses it is seeking to foster into new company drivers.

It plans to invest a total of 1.03 trillion won in research and development (R&D) and facilities this year, 81 percent or 830 billion won of which will be injected into future industries.

Samsung SDI, founded back in January 1970, began producing convex CRT screens under the name Samsung-NEC and was later renamed Samsung Display Device in February 1984. Then in December 1999, the company changed its corporate identity to Samsung SDI.

Beginning with Malaysia in 1990, Samsung SDI has established a worldwide production network, setting up production subsidiaries in Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Hungary and the Chinese cities of Shenzhen, Tianjin and Dongguan.

Samsung SDI handed over its thin film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) and PC monitor units to Samsung Electronics in 1991 and 1994, respectively, and entered rechargeable battery, PDP and OLED at the turn of the Millennium.

Martyn Williams, IDG News Service
Friday, May 20, 2005
Samsung Electronics has developed what it says is the world's first organic light emitting diode (OLED) display that measures 40-inches across the diagonal.

OLEDs have been viewed as a potential replacement for LCDs and PDPs (plasma display panels) in some applications for several years. They don't require a power-hungry backlight and so are viewed favorably for portable applications. Generally faster response rates of OLED screens means they are also being considered for use in televisions.

The new display is about four times the size of its nearest competitor, a 21-inch prototype that was announced in January by Samsung Electronics. Prior to that panel, the largest had been a 20-inch prototype produced by Japan's Seiko Epson. The Japanese company had also produced a 40-inch panel in the past but had done so by combining 4 of its 20-inch panels to create a larger screen. The new Samsung prototype is a single panel. Easier to Produce
Samsung used an a-Si (Amorphous Silicon) production process, similar to that used in some LCD production, to make the prototype. That means the panel can be made on existing LCD manufacturing lines and thus could mean a cut in the investment required to begin mass production. It also enables the production of larger size panels, such as the 21-inch and 40-inch prototypes. Panels produced using other methods are typically much smaller.

Brightness has been improved on the new panel versus the previous Samsung prototype, from 400 nits (candela per square meter) to 600 nits, and it has a contrast ratio of 5000 to 1. The screen has a resolution of 1280 pixels by 800 pixels (WXGA).Samsung expects panels based on OLED technology will one day lead to the realization of flat-panel televisions that are 3 centimeters or less in depth. The company is also participating in a South Korean Ministry of Commerce, Industry & Energy research project into future television technology using such panels.

Samsung Electronics will give the panel its public unveiling at the Society for Information Display's upcoming exhibition and conference that runs in Boston from May 24 to 27.  

During a breakfast presentation at the Society for Information Display Conference Wednesday (May 25), Peter Bocko, division vice president and director of commercial technology for Corning's Display Group, said glass would serve as the platform for several value-added display applications.

Bocko said he envisions display glass increasingly integrating circuit functions to improve functionality and lower cost. He also expects this approach to spawn more system-on-glass applications.

Attempting to debunk the myth of "disruptive" OLED technology, Bocko said many OLED displays would use the same active-matrix LCD platform, utilizing Corning glass materials.

Bocko said Corning was exploring development of non-glass materials for flexible substrates. He did not elaborate.

While most of Corning's glass is used for amorphous silicon thin-film transistor (TFT) substrates, Bocko said the company was increasing production of higher-grade glass for polysilicon TFT substrates heavily used in mobile LCD displays.

Bocko claimed Corning is the only supplier currently producing glass for seventh-generation fabs. He added the company is developing eighth-generation glass technology, though generation 10 glass technology might be the practical limit for glass makers due to issues such as handling, Bocko added.

Universal Display demos transparent OLED
Universal Display (UDC) today announced the development of the world's first high-resolution active-matrix transparent OLED (AM-TOLED) display

According to UDC, the device is a step toward the creation of -motion video displays that provide transparency when turned off. Such displays one day could be used in applications such as architectural vision glass, entertainment, medical and industrial products, helmet shields for military, homeland security, as well as fire and rescue.

UDC's monochrome prototype display offers a resolution of 120 x 160 pixels (QQVGA) at 200 dpi. The company did not say when such transparent displays could be commercially available.