OLED Lighting Material Trends

Published: November 07, 2011    Category: Advanced Materials OLED Lighting

While OLED lighting is still in the early stages of commercialization with small-quantity production on pilot lines. But panel shipments for OLED lighting applications are expected to really ramp up starting around the 2014 – 2015 timeframe.  Observers of the OLED lighting industry, including NanoMarkets, have been projecting growth for a while now, but some recent developments are making those projections look more certain than ever:

First, interest in OLED lighting is feeding off the general promotion of energy-efficient solid-state lighting and the potential for novel product designs that OLEDs bring to the lighting marketplace.  This has led to the actual commercialization of products. Prices for OLED lighting luminaires have come down from the stratospheric thousands of dollars they were just a couple of years ago to a few hundred dollars in many design kits today. Certainly, there is still a long way to go before OLED lighting is cheap enough for widespread consumer usages, but the increasing number of firms offering design kits at more reasonable prices is notable as it indicates progress in the right direction.

Second, materials are at last emerging that truly enable the production of panels with improved performance, especially in the related technical actors of device efficiency and lifetime.  Long-lifetime all-phosphorescent white OLED material sets are now available. These materials go a long way towards improving the efficiency of OLED lighting enough to compete meaningfully with CFLs and LEDs. Now the

OLED industry needs to demonstrate that this significant technical development can be translated into real, commercial products, at reasonable prices.
The move toward all-phosphorescent functional materials brings up another important factor:  the continuing dominance of Universal Display Corporation in the OLED lighting materials industry.  Despite recent challenges to some of UDC’s IP portfolio in Japan, Korea, and Europe, UDC continues to expand its network of licensees. UDC’s control of key parts of the OLED materials business is a trend we expect to continue. 

Third, the industry has almost universally settled on vapor-deposited small molecules for the near future.  Polymeric OLEDs are simply not a factor today, and the only holdout on the solution-processable small molecule front is GE. But GE’s recent lack of commercial success with their OLED business line brings into question the future of this solution-processable technology in OLED lighting, at least for the period of this report.

Finally, China has emerged in the last two years as a significant factor in the OLED lighting industry. Today, Chinese OLED manufacturers like Visionox are making their own materials or sourcing from local, Chinese suppliers, and are helping to build a significant OLED materials industry in China. .  It is too soon to know exactly what this will mean for other Asian (and Western) materials suppliers, but the region is worth watching to see how it develops.

What does all this mean for materials suppliers? The projected growth in production (and panel size) of OLED lighting means that much-needed economies of scale for the OLED materials suppliers are at last on the horizon. UDC’s dominance means that other suppliers of functional organic materials will have to find creative ways to collaborate with UDC to maintain relevance in the business. And the lack of progress to date on solution-processing signifies that a focus on vapor-deposition for the near-term may be in order.

Overall, the changes in the OLED lighting market, and the increased relative importance of OLED lighting compared to displays, mean that materials suppliers to the OLED industry will have expanded opportunities to generate revenues selling their materials – from substrates and transparent conductors to organic semiconductors, emissive materials, and encapsulation technologies.

See NanoMarkets' related report on OLED lighting materials

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