From the opening keynote through more than a hundred papers, panels, and poster sessions, the Society for Information Display’s Display Week in Seattle this week featured OLEDs.
Dr. Sang-Soo Kim, executive vice president, Samsung Mobile Display (SMD), giving the premier first keynote position, hailed OLEDs as “the next growth driver in the television market,” Dr. Kim’s keynote address, entitled “The Next Big Thing in Displays,” focused on Samsung’s plans for AMOLED technology.
Dr. Kim indicated that the company would ship 45 million small/medium OLED displays this year and projected growth to 600 million by 2015, hinting that the total could reach 1 billion. He outlined SMD’s plans to expand manufacturing from Gen 4 to a Gen 5.5 facility with 75,000 substrate starts/month. Dr. Kim, the leader of SMD’s R&D organization discussed how SMD would solve the issues of scaling to a Gen 8 facility to produce standard and 3D televisions as large as 55 inches in diagonal. At the same time, he admonished his standing-room-only audience several times that markets are “built” and that building them was work for the whole industry.
Leaving the speech and heading to the exhibits, attendees might have wondered, “Where’s the beef?” SMD, the world’s leading producer of OLED displays, showed none in its booth, and LG Display, manufacturer of the only commercially available 15-inch OLED television, showed only a single 15-inch display based on an RGBW architecture.
“It’s pretty clear, the industry leaders are getting ready to make a big push in the market and are reluctant to give away any of their product plans,” said Barry Young, managing director, OLED Association. “Neither is willing to tip its hand on any innovations they expect to bring to market.”
Other exhibitors, however, did demonstrate new OLED materials, manufacturing processes and equipment. Some highlights:
SID-2010 OLED Highlights
•Universal Display Corporation’s new blue phosphorescent OLED material
•Novaled’s new materials and their application to solid state lighting, as well as
•Corning’s 60 – 70 µm, thin glass that could provide a flexible substrate with the characteristics of glass
•eMagin’s SXGA microdisplay in several applications
•DuPont’s use of a-Si backplanes based on Ignis Innovation’s AdMo™ circuit and compensation technology
•SimOLED’s newest simulation software for OLED lighting and displays
•Braun’s plans for building OLED deposition equipment for Gen 5 and larger substrates
“It’s been a great conference for OLED,” noted Young. “From the first keynote, through the sessions through the innovation we’ve seen on the floor, OLEDs are starting to fulfill the promise of becoming a prominent display technology.”
