Rapid Advances in OLEDs in East Asia

In Organic Light Emitting Diode OLED production and its technology, East Asia leads the world by a big margin, though with the older, glass-based technology and usually through license of key intellectual property from Western companies such as Kodak, UDC and DuPont. Over 70 percent of patents taken out in East Asia on printed and potentially printed components now relate to OLEDs. Consequently, when the earliest key OLED patents, mainly in the West, lapse, a considerable amount of the key intellectual property will probably be located in East Asia.

 

 

Hard work is proceeding to make the region a leader in the next generation - printed flexible OLEDs, again using knowhow licenses from Western companies, in this case UDC and CDT in particular. However, the first printed semiconductor factory in the world was commissioned in March 2007 in Austria, not East Asia and it can handle flexible substrates. It was the Nanoident production line for photodetector arrays that are basically OLEDs in reverse.

 

Some Western companies are starting to sell a few flexible OLED displays. They have limited life and perhaps of more significance is the immense buildup of research on OLEDs both as lighting and as displays that is progressing across the East Asian region. A dramatic illustration of this was seen in the USA in May 20-25 2007, at one of the world's largest conferences on displays called SID INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM 2007. The presentations for the OLED session consisted of 44 from East Asia and only 33 from the whole of the Western hemisphere.

 

 

Although nearly all of the publicity concerns OLED displays, many East Asian organizations have major programs on OLED lighting. For example, Hitachi, already printing antennas for RFID and many other components, presented the following this week on OLED displays and lighting and transistor drive circuits all of which are progressing to being printed.

 

May 20-25 2007, "2007 SID INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM", Long Beach California, the following was presented

 

 

 

 

Hitachi

Headquarters 6-6,

Marunouchi 1-chome,

Chiyoda-ku,

Tokyo, 100-8280 Japan

phone:+81-3-3258-1111

 

 

For more see the new report, published June 2007, Printed Electronics in East Asia  which profiles 138 organisations and 334 projects, with analysis.