fantastic plastic

According to Reuters, Sony are planning to be the first to bring OLED TVs to the Market later this year.

At a display forum in Tokyo, customers, suppliers, and even rival TV makers turned their backs on 50-inch and bigger TVs to throng before Sony’s tiny 11-inch OLED TVs.
“LCD and plasma displays look faded in comparison,” said a Denso Corp. employee who declined to be named, fighting to take a picture of the new TVs. […]
The OLED TV to be launched this year will be made by ST Liquid Crystal Display Corp., a joint venture between Sony and Toyota Industries Corp., Sony spokesperson Daiichi Yamafuji said, declining to give unit targets or a likely price. […]
The Nikkei business daily reported earlier that Sony would begin by mass-producing about 1,000 of the 11-inch OLED sets a month?a fraction of its LCD TV business?and would aim to keep its price within a few times that of existing flat TVs. […]
Other companies investing in OLED displays include Seiko Epson, Canon, Samsung and a joint venture between Toshiba and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co..
Toshiba President Atsutoshi Nishida said on Thursday the company hoped to make larger TV-use OLED panels at the joint venture, Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Co., by 2009, taking aim at the $35 billion flat TV market, which is currently dominated by LCD and plasma display technology.

According to DigiTimes,

Japan’s Dai Nippon Printing (DNP) will commercialize OLED (organic light-emitting diode) panels before the end of fiscal year 2008, according to the company.
Jointly with a research institute, the Japanese vendor plans to develop technology to extend the lifespan of panels by ten times that of conventional products to 10,000 hours, with a brightness at 1,000 cd/m2, the company said.
The maker will start by offering light-emitting sign displays and aims to proceed with development of traffic advertisement applications, DNP noted.

According to a new report by NanoMarkets,

the market for OLEDs used in displays and lighting applications is expected to reach $10.9 billion ($US) by 2012 and grow to $15.5 billion by the year 2014.

The report discusses the use of OLEDs for mobile devices, flexible/rollable displays, and lighting applications.
[via CNET news]

The Cambridge Evening News is reporting that

Amazon, the world’s biggest bookseller, is in talks with Cambridge company, Plastic Logic, about the end of books as we know them. […]
News of the Amazon/Plastic Logic link was given to a Cambridge audience on Thursday night when Hermann Hauser delivered the RSA Lecture at Magdalene College. […]
“The reason why Amazon doesn’t sell e-books at the moment is because people don’t like reading on a screen, but now they can curl
up with an e-book,” Dr Hauser said.

This past week, Plastic Logic has been showing off its new product concepts at a trade show in San Francisco, under the heading ‘Life is Flexible‘.

DisplaySearch

has updated its 2006 OLED Technology Report, a comprehensive examination of the fledgling OLED industry, which reached revenues of $491M in 2005, up 8% Y/Y, and unit shipments of 55.8M, up 72%. Updates are due to a number of recent changes affecting the OLED industry:

* Liquidation of SK Display
* TMDisplay and Seiko Epson de-emphasizing commercialization of AMOLEDs
* Pioneer closing its ELDis JV and the concurrent end of its AMOLED activity
* Sharp reduction in small/medium panel ASPs due to over capacity in TFT LCDs
* Continuing difficulty in using LTPS backplanes for AMOLEDs

One of the unique features of the report is a forecast of the OLED capacity as shown in Table 2 by active, passive, SM and P-OLED technology and the associated organic material usage in weight and in revenue, differentiated by emitting and conducting layers for both small molecule and P-OLEDs. The organic material is forecast to grow from $220M in 2005 to $549M in 2010, driven by the increased capacity of the AMOLED display makers.

*Includes material used in production and R&D facilities for 2” displays

NE Asia is reporting on iSuppli market predictions for flexible displays.

Note that according to their prediction, flat or formed displays (not bent during use) will take the lion’s share, while

True flexibility/rollability will appear in displays with small shipments in 2008, and will become a US$59 million market in 2013 […].

Challenges for the flexible display industry are listed as:
- the OLED industry’s promised shift to flexible has still not happened
- large investments are required in manufacturing infrastructure *
- new, unknown market

* [While this is certainly true for new deposition/patterning methods (e.g. inkjet printing) the hurdle is much lower for companies using traditional lithography.]

 

 

NanoMarkets predictions for the OLED and e-paper, smart packaging, and thin-film photovoltaics industries:

Markets for OLED and Paper-Like Displays to Total $10.2 Billion by 2011:

• combined sales of OLED displays and paper-like displays will reach $10.2 billion by 2011 and then go on to reach $14.7 billion by 2013.
• shelf-edge displays will be the biggest opportunity for the paper-like display business in the next few years, generating $1.2 billion in annual revenues by 2011.
• OLED televisions will reach $2.2 billion in revenues in 2011
• by 2011, flexible displays will account for $1.7 billion in revenues.

Smart Packaging Market to Reach $4.8 billion by 2011:

• The global smart packaging market will grow to $4.8 billion in 2011 and reach $14.1 billion in 2013
• Smart packaging will account for over $1.1 billion in printable electronics components by 2011 growing to $4.2 billion in 2013
• Smart packaging will also consume $1.1 billion in printable and chip-based RFID tags by 2011

Thin Film and Organic Photovoltaic Market To Reach $2.3 Billion ($US) in 2011:

• Integrated building and construction products such as PV enabled roofing and window materials are projected to be the largest market opportunity measuring $800 million ($US) in 2011 with large project and consumer electronic products the second and third largest market opportunities.
• On the materials front, amorphous silicon, the best established of the various thin-film PV materials, will represent an $800 million ($US) opportunity followed by organic and hybrid organic/inorganic materials and then CIS/CIGS.
• Thin film/organic PV is also generating buzz in the industry and several companies have received large VC rounds. Major multinationals are also supporting this technology as Honda has announced it will soon start full-scale production of thin film PV and Shell has just sold off its conventional PV business to focus on thin film. On the other hand, NanoMarkets points out that thin film and organic PV is also a technology space that has received its fair share of hype and controversy with competing claims by different manufacturers on where and how it can be applied and disputes over conversion efficiencies and costs per watt.

The New York times has an article (free registration required) on newspapers going electronic. The Belgian newspaper “De Tijd” is currently running a trial (Mobile Read article) with the iRex iLiad Reader. [via Engadget]

This article at IDTechEx talks about the decline of the traditional printing industry, and new markets in the field of printed electronics.

Are the ink makers, machinery suppliers and others variously specialising in flexo, litho, ink jet, screen, gravure and other technologies looking like the steam engine experts of one hundred years ago? The answer is probably not. Certainly there is a fascinating escape route opening up for some. It is the printing of electronics.

Apart from cost savings, printing electronics enables the fabrication of new (flexible) devices and easier integration of components (e.g. displays, batteries, antennas, resistors, …).

Printed electronics will kick the silicon chip out of the talking gift card as well as the discrete components and wires to which it is attached. But that is the least of what it will do. The film Minority Report showed it giving us the moving colour display and voice over on the cornflake packet. Interactive games on disposable paper packaging have already been demonstrated in real life but more serious uses will also drive printed electronics forward.

The following table lists some of the companies involved in the printing of functional devices (Source IDTechEx)

According to a report by Displaybank

Overall OLED shipments reached more than 61 million units for the year 2005, and revenues hit almost US$600 million, according to Displaybank (CEO Kwon Sang-Sei), a market research firm.

The clear leaders in 2005 were Taiwan (27 million units) and Korea (22 million units), followed by Japan (8 million units).

BusinessWeek has a story on electronic ink applications, such as Hitachi’s electronic paper advertisement displays, updated via wireless connection.
They remind us of the fact that modern information technoloy has not led to the once envisioned paper-free office.

But the fact is, paper hasn’t gone away. The spread of the Internet and the rise of the PC have made information ever more accessible, leading not to the death of paper but to its proliferation. In 2004, worldwide paper production was roughly 400 million tons, compared with about 300 million in 1995, according to Japan Pulp & Paper statistics.

It remains to be seen whether or how soon e-paper will replace real paper. Applications such as rewritable shop price tags and billboards, where e-paper can provide added functionality, compared with traditional paper,

could help the market for e-paper surge to nearly $900 million by 2011, from $2 million last year, according to Tokyo-based market watcher Techno System Research.

The article goes on to mention colour electronic paper and printable OLEDs.
It’s cleary a business article, so we can forgive them for confusing some of the technical details:

Despite their differences, LCDs and OLEDs share two important traits: They can quickly change what they display and don’t need a backlight, so the only time they use power is when text or images change.

Of course LCDs and OLEDs are fast compared to most e-paper types, but, unlike bistable e-paper, constantly require power. Also, most LCDs do need a backlight (or frontlight), at least for low-light situations.

NE Asia Online on the 2006 OLED Technology Report by DisplaySearch

Revenues of OLED industry is expected to total over US$500M in 2005, up 18% Y/Y, according to the 2006 OLED Technology Report from DisplaySearch. OLED display makers are in transition from passive matrix to active matrix centricity, not unlike LCDs in the early to mid 1990s. The difference is that AMOLED display makers are expected to ride the benefits of the existing TFT infrastructure created for LCDs.

Table 1 OLED Display Revenue by Application (US$ million)

Table 2 Organic Material Forecast (US$) vs Display Production

First announced on May 24, 2005

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) and Sumitomo Chemical have announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding which will lead to the formation of a new joint venture company to develop and supply advanced polymer OLED (P-OLED) materials and formulated inks for use in commercial P-OLED display and lighting applications.
The new company, to be based in Tokyo, Japan, will be owned equally by the two parent companies, and will have the largest concentration of P-OLED material development expertise and intellectual property (IP) in the OLED industry.

The parent companies will channel their existing P-OLED materials research and development activities into the new JV company, which will have access to the P-OLED material IP of the parent companies. Sumitomo has recently completed the acquisition of the Lumation business from The Dow Chemical Company, and will make available, on an exclusive basis, the polyfluorenes technology and IP of the Lumation business to the joint venture.

The joint venture, named Sumation (October 19, 2005), has now been completed and has

commenced trading on November 14th 2005.
Sumationâ„¢ supplies polymers and formulated inks for use in both development and commercial P-OLED display and lighting applications. The company is headquartered in Tokyo, and has an R & D team located in both the UK and Japan, while production of polymer materials will take place under sub contract at the Sumitomo Chemical plant in Osaka.

According to IDTechEx projections,

organic electronics will be a $30 billion business by 2015 mainly due to logic/memory, displays and lighting. The report […] indicates that this could rise to $250 billion by 2025, with major sales from logic/memory; OLED displays for electronic products; OLED billboard and signage; non-emissive organic displays; as well as lighting, batteries and photovoltaics. […]

“Progress is exponential, not linear, and, although the organic electronics business may be $4.75 billion in 2010, with OLED displays making nearly all the running, by 2015, startling progress on a broad front will be visible and by 2025, the business will rival silicon chips in size - yet, oddly, not impacting silicon chip sales much at all.”

IDTechEx believe that there are few other technologies that will have such an impact on industry in the next twenty years. Organic electronics in the form of smart packaging, electronic billboards, posters, signage and electronic books will impact the conventional printing and publishing industry. Organic lighting will severely dent sales of both incandescent and fluorescent lighting.

Percentage of organic electronic market by value 2020 [Source: IDTechEx]