The launch of Universal Display Corporation’s (UDC) more efficient blue phosphorescent OLED will not happen this year.
That is a key takeout from a recent UDC earnings call.
The company has spent years working on the blue OLED (organic light-emitting diode), which it believes will cut power consumption and lead to greater screen brightness by lowering the drive voltages necessary to achieve blue light emission.
“Regarding blue, we continue to make excellent progress in our ongoing development work for a commercial phosphorescent blue emissive system,” said UDC president and CEO Steven Abramson.
“Since the beginning of 2022, we’ve achieved significant advances in our phosphorescent blue development work, and we believe that we are nearing commercial entry specifications. However, we believe we need more time to further refine our phosphorescent blue emissive materials, and that work is expected to extend beyond this year.”
He said the time needed would be “measured in months and not years”.
“Even though our timeline is shifting, our confidence in delivering a commercial phosphorescent blue to the market and the tremendous promise it has for the OLED industry has not wavered. Interest in our phosphorescent blue continues to increase. The bottom-line is phosphorescent blue is coming. We just need some more time before commercial introduction.”
According to a research paper by Jong Kyu Kim from Taiwan’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, published in the US National Library of Medicine in September 2023, OLEDs have “outperformed conventional [LCD] display technologies in smartphones, smartwatches, tablets and televisions while gradually growing to cover a sizable fraction of the solid-state lighting industry”.
“Blue emission is a crucial chromatic component for realising high-quality red, green, blue, and yellow (RGBY) and RGB white display technologies and solid-state lighting sources. For consumer products with desirable lifetimes and efficiency, deep blue emissions with much higher power efficiency and operation time are necessary prerequisites.”
The study described OLED as a “truly disruptive technology” but added that “OLED lighting is not yet successful as compared against LED lighting, although its revenue is rising gradually”.
It said the number of papers published and patents filed for blue OLEDs had increased significantly “over the past years”.
