Ryan,
The phase space of display technology is immense, but pure intellectual property organic LED companies like CDT and Universal Display Corp. still like to quote $200B for the market size they play in. Be careful of that.
You point out that LEP and OLEDs in general are very moisture sensitive. The same is true with liquid crystals. The problem is straight forward to solve in manufacturing with encapsulation and the problems have obviously been worked on in the LCD industry and can be applied to OLEDs easily since both technologies share the same glass substrates.
The hype over OLEDs is that they can work like LCDs except you can trade a backlight, polarizers, and LCs for the polymer or small molecule organic layer, and hope to gain in overall efficiency. This is absolutely true in principle, but your analysis of high info content displays is right on. The cost of any high info content display is not in the light making part, rather the drivers and active matrix part. For example, LCD factories require numerous clean room litho, etch etc. processes to form the a-Si AM circuitry, after which the LCD is simply spead on top and the package is sealed up.
I see a straightforward path to market for OLED displays at low info content, especially monochrome, because there you are simply talking about patterning mm sized ITO lines on glass, spreading polymer across it, shadowing a top metal orthogonal line array on top and sealing it up. Drivers are attached at the periphery. This can be cheap and efficient, and easily realize the advantages touted for OLEDs, but the market is limited to cheapo displays. For example, Pioneer is shortly commercializing one such dot matrix display for their consumer electronics products, such as stereo systems.
I don't see a path to market yet for real displays, and it looks like even the personal display market, e.g. cellphones, is rapidly moving to high info content with color using p-Si or even single crystal Si technology at a higher price point. OLEDs still have to demonstrate color patterning on um not mm pixel dimensions, and they have a narrow lead to begin with vs LCD technology, mainly because LCD backlights manager 30+ Lumens/Watt efficiency, so if only 5% of the light makes it through, they are still beating the 1 L/W benchmark. OLEDs have demonstrated 12 L/W in pulsed operation at low power and there is great hope that this performance level can be extended to practical applications, but don't expect it soon in high info content.
CDT holds the patents from Cambridge University, which invented the polymer LED. Kodak invented a more versatile small organic molecule LED several years prior and has much of that IP locked up. CDT decided several years ago to become an IP firm and now merely tries to develop news patents and raise revenue by licensing their polymer IP to firms such as Philips, Hoechst and an American startup by the name of Uniax. Philips in turn is eyeballing the low info content market as far as I can tell while Hoechst wants to synthesize the polymers. CDT seems to be doing well, and the investment from INTC must indicate that INTC believes the technology can further computing, i.e. be scaled up to make cheaper high info content displays and drive wider adoption of Pentiums. I don't think CDT is publicly traded at the moment.
A play in the OLED arena is Universal Display Corp. which holds patents out of Princeton for one approach to color patterning. There still hasn't been a real demo yet from them or their technology, but they are publicly traded, and they are now accumulating IP in the area of organic lasers, which could have a future. It's very difficult to gauge the value of such companies, since their entire assets are patents, which depending on their strength can be licensed for anywhere from 1% to 10% of revenue.
I'm not an investor in Universal since I think OLED is only going to penetrate a somewhat dubious low end market, and will still have price competition from low end, entrenched LCD, always a danger sign in the display industry, i.e. entrenched displays like the CRT have incredible staying power it seems. Investors wishing to play in this area might wait for Uniax to go public, or else watch Universal for an extended time and buy on a dip.
Most of all, please don't anybody repeat Universal's oft made claim that they are playing in the global $200B display industry. |
