DuPont Licenses OLED Technology to Major Asian TV Manufacturer

1/24/2012 10:00 AM 

In November, Dupont said that it had signed a licensing agreement for its proprietary solution-based printing technology to be used by a leading Asian manufacturer to make large AMOLED televisions. At press time, DuPont was – at the manufacturer's request -- not at liberty to reveal the name of the manufacturer. Since Asian TV makers with a vested interest in OLEDs can be counted on the fingers of one hand, the pool of possible partners is small indeed, with online speculation leaning in the direction of Samsung or LG. Nothing is certain until the partnership is made public, which, according to Bill Feehery, Global Business Director for Dupont, will definitely happen on an as-yet undisclosed date.

DuPont's technology is of particular interest because it allows the OLED materials to be spray-printed on a backplane using a superfast multinozzle technique. The printer, developed by DuPoint in conjunction with Dai Nippon Screen, uses a continuous spray of ink rather than droplets, and coats the substrate at rates of four to five meters per second. According to DuPont, a Gen 4 OLED display can be printed in about 2 minutes.

The company has been working on this technique for several years. "We've had many iterations," says Feehery. "It wasn't easy." The key challenges were improving the performance of the material, including its color and efficiency, and being able to print at a high yield without mura. The key to scaling up to Gen 4 was using multiple nozzles, notes Feehery.

This announcement would seem to indicate that OLED TVs are inching closer to commercial reality, although "We're only a piece of the OLED puzzle," Feehery is quick to point out. Other developers have had to solve issues such as reliable encapsulation and the ability to make backplanes at a larger size. And this has been happening. Feehery notes that even if DuPont had had the process ready five years ago, there wouldn't have been a market for it because the other pieces of the OLED equation weren't ready. Are they ready now? We'll have to wait just a bit longer to find out.

For more background on this technology, see the article from DuPont Displays, “Clearing the Road to Mass Production of OLED Television, in the October 2011 issue of Information Display.

--Jenny Donelan