In this article NanoMarkets examines the current thinking on market opportunities for transparent conductors in touch screen markets. 

Development of OLED technology for lighting markets is not as mature as for displays, but NanoMarkets still expects this sector to grow dramatically over the coming decade.  And because OLED lighting panels are likely to be a (1) a mass market and (2) consist of panels a lot larger than the average OLED displays, the market for OLED lighting materials should ultimately be a lot larger than those for materials in the display sector.  However, much more risk is associated with the lighting sector, for materials suppliers and just about everyone else.

NanoMarkets believes that materials suppliers will play a big role in whether the OLED lighting industry booms or settles into a niche pattern.  For real, sustained growth in OLED lighting, new, better materials and processes are needed to enable this growth.

The value that would be created by a flexible glass material has long been recognized.  Supposedly the Roman Emperor Tiberius was presented with a drinking bowl made of flexible glass.  The Emperor threw the bowl on the floor and it dented rather than shattered.  But not much seems to have been heard of flexible glass since.  NanoMarkets research has uncovered that over the past few decades the term “flexible glass” has come to be used in a metaphorical sense, to describe a series of materials that were made from resins and plastics and that otherwise had glass-like properties.  Unfortunately these flexible pseudo-glasses could seldom compete with actual glass in terms of transparency or in its barrier qualities.

However, since the early 21st Century a handful of leading glass companies have been developing genuinely flexible glasses that are the heirs to Tiberius’ bowl.  The firms involved in this work include AGC (more commonly referred to as Asahi Glass), Nippon Electric Glass (NEG), Tokyo Electron Glass (TEG) and Schott Glass.  However, the firm that is most closely associated with flexible glass is Corning, which certainly has the greatest mindshare in this space and has done the most business development work to promote the concept of flexible device.

When NanoMarkets first started providing analysis of the transparent conductor (TC) industry, some six years or so ago, the industry was easy to characterize.  ITO ruled the roost, except where the market was looking for especially low-cost solutions; in antistatic applications.   True, executives in the display industry – and even in the transparent conductor industry itself – knew all the unkind things to say about ITO.  It cracked, it cost a lot, even that it had a yellowish tinge, etc., etc.

When one examined at the alternatives, ITO began to look pretty good.  None of them could compete with ITO on the crucial transparency and conductivity parameters.  In any case, most of the alternatives to ITO were not ready for prime time; at best they were in that limbo phase called sampling.  The threat to ITO from its rivals was negligible.

After many years of languishing, OLEDs have finally emerged as a real market, and the opportunities for growth are great, especially for firms that can offer encapsulation technologies with tangible performance and cost benefits over the market-dominant cover glass strategies in use today.

Flexible electronics have attracted a great deal of interest in recent years. At least in theory, they offer a number of important advantages for displays, lighting, solar panels and sensors.  In addition, flexibility to some degree is implied in the notion of R2R processing.  Each of these applications requires different strategic thinking about the appropriate flexible substrate to use, but there is also an important commonality which NanoMarkets believes will create a vibrant market for flexible substrates of all kinds.

OLEDs are highly vulnerable to oxygen and water vapor, so they present an encapsulation issue; developments to improve barrier performance have been discussed in the OLED industry since its earliest days. Until recently, however, OLED encapsulation materials represented a relatively small market for chemical companies and a few startups. For many years there were few signs that OLEDs were going to break out of their niche market pattern, with almost all of the OLED market being accounted for by passive matrix displays for MP3 payers, cell phone sub-displays, etc.

The situation was further complicated by the popular notion among OLED manufacturers that encapsulation was the least of their worries, since most OLEDs could be successfully encapsulated in a stack that often also included desiccant under glass using epoxy adhesives for edge sealing. The simple glass and epoxy encapsulation approach was not only all that was required for small displays, it was all that display makers were willing to pay for, and it continues to be the principal encapsulation strategy in place today.

Even as the size of the passive matrix OLED business grew, true opportunities for OLED encapsulation were highly limited, and few materials firms were able to sustain a business based on encapsulation materials alone.  And although materials suppliers were initially happy to supply these applications, they did so with the expectation that markets large enough to justify their efforts would eventually emerge.

NanoMarkets predicts that the OLED materials market will increase from $317 million in 2011 to just over $5 billion in 2018, with revenues from cathode, anode and encapsulation materials gaining in importance over the period. This strong growth is fueled by a sea change in the status of the OLED industry.  For many years, the industry has been plagued with the low volume/high price conundrum for several years.  But that that situation appears to be changing, according to NanoMarkets’ recent report, Markets for OLED Materials-2011.  

Emerging technology markets are difficult to forecast in part because new applications often depend on several component innovations. Each of these technologies evolves independently, but the application cannot emerge until all of the components are sufficiently mature. Smart labels for shipping and logistics are such an application. They incorporate RFID tags, sensors, and batteries. For cost reasons, the ideal smart label would use printing technology for all three components. Yet printed electronics are just beginning to become commercially important, and as a result the technology needed to support smart labels is only starting to emerge.

The motivation for using alt-TCOs is usually that money can be saved on materials, and  most often because large amounts of indium can be avoided.  This matter has taken on a new urgency in view of recent Chinese industrial and trade policy, which favors controls on exports of indium.  The Chinese government has also shut down environmentally unsound indium extraction facilities.  The potential opportunities for alt-TCOs seem to have grown as a result, although these TCOs also now have to compete increasingly with next-generation transparent conductors that will almost certainly outperform them given time. Adding to the fun are new applications for alt-TCOs and the emergence of new kinds of TCOs.  One new application that we see as being of considerable importance for these materials is so-called smart windows.  Such windows have enjoyed niche status for many years, but may well emerge as a mass market product if the green building movement continues to fulfill it's promise.