Someday, flat panels -- like the screen on your laptop -- will be the standard displays for computers, TVs and cell phones. But today's most common flat panels -- liquid crystal displays (LCDs) -- are expensive, hard-to-manufacture electricity hogs. That's why monitor makers are all a-goggle over organic light-emitting devices, known as OLEDs.
Originally developed by Kodak in the late '70s and since refined by a host of companies (including Cambridge Display Technology, DuPont, IBM, NEC, Philips and Universal Display), OLEDs are based on something called electroluminescence. Certain organic materials emit light when an electric current passes through them. Sandwich such materials between two electrodes and you've got a display.
In addition to soaking up less electricity than LCDs, OLEDs are easier to manufacture. That simplicity, along with lower materials costs, makes them cheaper to build. Yet they're brighter than LCDs, with better color saturation and a wider viewing angle.
And because they can be quite thin, OLEDs make all sorts of sci-fi scenarios possible. Imagine stock quotes scrolling across your pen, or movies playing on your handheld. Already, Pioneer has released a car radio-cum-navigation device that uses a 64-by-256-pixel OLED screen to display traffic conditions. Motorola's Timeport P8767 phone, which just debuted, sports an OLED screen. Seiko plans to release an OLED phone capable of full-color video in 2002. IBM has announced plans for fist PDA's & sub notebooks OLED
Pioneer of America, the only company to mass-produce OLED (organic light emitting diode) displays, has tried to go one step further by being the first company to show prototypes of active-matrix OLEDs at the Society for Information Displays conference.
OLED displays use emissive technology, meaning they emit light themselves, like a CRT (cathode ray tube) television or a plasma display, eliminating the need for the backlight required by LCDs. By cutting out the backlighting, display makers can create panels that are both thinner and consume less power.
Pioneer's current OLED displays are passive-matrix and used currently only in car stereo displays and in Motorola's TimePort 8767 phone. But by the third quarter, the company expects to see its active-matrix OLEDs, which will have a higher refresh rate and thus higher image quality, in devices. However, the one problem is that applications that can take full advantage of these displays do not exist on mobile phones or PDAs.... Yet!
Pioneer, in Tokyo, is showing a 1.8-inch and a 4-inch full-color active-matrix OLED display. Just 2 millimeters thick, these full-color screens have a refresh rate about 1,000 times faster than traditional LCD screens, Wzorek said.
Pioneer is currently in talks with device makers to get the active-matrix OLEDs in products, but declined to disclose any names. When the screens do hit the market, they will likely be in high-end mobile phones and high-end PDAs, and Pioneer plans to sell the screens to manufacturers for "about 1.2 times to 1.5 times the cost of a full color LCD screen, with a quick ramp downward,"
Earlier this year, Tohoku Pioneer, Semiconductor Energy Laboratory, and Sharp formed a company called ELDis to work on technology to accelerate OLED development. The new company works on the development of continuous-grain silicon TFT (thin film transistor) substrate, a key technology in OLED development, Pioneer said in a statement.
Display vendors this week will show the public what they believe screens of the future will look like at the Society for Information Display's annual symposium, seminar, and exhibition when they fight for attention with tiny OLED displays.
OLED displays use emissive technology, meaning they emit light themselves, like a CRT television or a plasma display, eliminating the need for the backlight required by LCDs. By cutting out the backlighting, display makers can create panels that are both thinner and consume less power, said Kimberly Allen, director of technology and strategic research for analyst group Stanford Resources.
The market for OLED displays is set to explode from a $29 million market in 2000 to a $1.6 billion market in 2003, according to a Stanford Resources report.
Although consumers probably will not see OLEDs in their notebooks this year, the technology will probably make it to PDAs within the next few months.
In Asia, some companies use the term OELD (organic electroluminescence display) to refer to the same technology.
Currently, Pioneer is the only company with OLED technology on the market. Pioneer launched the first OLED product, a car stereo display in 1998, and Motorola Timeport phone uses a Pioneer OLED display, Allen said.
"There are more products expected this year," Allen said. Products including another car stereo, a handheld game display, and more mobile phones are all expected to be rolled out onto the market this year from various vendors.
However, until prices fall, the manufacturers will not make displays much larger than mobile phone and car stereo displays. "They just don't have the manufacturing technology to make large panels reliably and at a reasonable price," Allen said. "But manufacturing cost is expected to be much lower than that of LCDs somewhere in the near future," she added.
Although OLED is not yet as common as LCD to consumers, there is a lot of development going on behind the scenes. "Every large Japanese display company is involved in OLED," Allen said. There is also a partnership between Samsung Electronics and NEC working on OLED, and Konin-Philips Electronics has been working on the technology as well.
Nearly 500 booths will fill the McEnery Convention Center for the display show, ranging from household names like Toshiba, NEC, and Sharp Electronics to lesser known companies including Candescent Technologies and LCD manufacturer Optrex America.
Tohoku Pioneer, a unit of Pioneer, will be demonstrating its three-inch color OLED panel, aimed at PDAs, which it created with Semi Conductor Energy Laboratory. The companies have also teamed up on a 1.8 inch color OLED display that they will be showing.
Optrex America, which was founded as a joint venture between Asahi Glass and Mitsubishi Electric, will also be showcasing its own OLED technology, which it expects to see in production of automobiles, most likely used in displays on stereos and climate control panels, by 2004.
Toshiba will show a prototype of its full-color polymer OLED at the show this week. The 2.85 inch display supports 260,000 colors in Q-CIF format. The current OLED technology on the market is small-molecule technology; polymer OLEDs have not been put into mass production yet, Allen said.
The only difference between polymer OLEDs and small-molecule OLEDs is the technique used to produce the display. "I wouldn't say that one is technically better than the other, but polymer is in an earlier state of development," Allen said.
Toshiba expects to start production of the polymer displays in fiscal 2002, initially targeting the mobile phone and small to midsize PDA markets, the company said. Following that, the company will target midsize and large displays, including high-end portable PCs that require higher resolution, Toshiba said.
Eastman Kodak is key patent holder for small-molecule OLED technology and may be the first to market with a Wall Hanger TV!
MAY 2002
AI
Market Data 
Markets 
