State of OLED lighting manufacturing

GLEN ALLEN, USA: Industry analyst firm, NanoMarkets released its newest report on the OLED lighting market. The report, "A Capacity and Opportunity Analysis of OLED Lighting Manufacturing" is the next in the firm's on-going coverage of this space.

Previous OLED lighting reports from NanoMarkets have provided granular market forecasts, assessments of European and Asian market opportunities, materials and the business case for OLED lighting.

The report also includes an eight-year forecast of OLED lighting manufacturing capacity broken out by individual manufacturer and whether the facilities will use solution processing or more conventional fabrication. An assessment of necessary investment levels for the manufacturing infrastructure is also part of this new report.

Among the firms covered in this report are: Aixtron, Applied Materials, AUO, Cannon Anelva, DuPont, GE, Kaneka, Kateeva, Konica Minolta, LG Chem, Lumiotec, Mitsubishi, Ledon, Moser Baer, NEC, Osram, Panasonic, Philips, Pioneer, PolyPhotonix, Rohm, Samsung, Sunic, Tokki, UDC, Ulvac, Veeco, and Visionox.

Key findings
While several firms have announced ambitious revenue goals for OLED lighting, no company has yet progressed beyond the pilot plant level for OLED manufacturing. NanoMarkets predicts that it will ultimately take billions of dollars in investment to achieve production levels required to meet these revenue objectives.

In today's difficult investment climate, NanoMarkets expects to see the rise of OLED "foundries" which will fabricate OLEDs for those lighting firms who have chosen a fabless business model. The report also says that some OLED lighting firms will use depreciated OLED display production lines where they are available.

NanoMarkets believes that in the long run, the only way for price points to get low enough to turn OLED lighting into a mass market will be when full-scale solution processing can be put into operation. But there are still significant problems to be resolved. For example, there is still little understanding how to print layers that are just 10-50 nm thick at high speed. Layers this thin are not unusual in the case of OLEDs.

GE and others have made good progress with regard to yields from solution processing plants. But for now, vapor deposition is king of the hill when it comes to fabricating OLEDs. One compromise solution may arrive in the form of hybrid technologies such as organic vapor jet printing which combines the best of OVPD with inkjet.