As we noted last week LG Display (LPL) announced that they have reached the commercialization stage  of their blue OLED panels.  While these panels are not quite the final step in the blue saga, as they use a combination of blue fluorescent and blue phosphorescent material to achieve results, they are certainly a step toward the ultimate goal of a three color (RGB) phosphorescent stack (see our 5/1/25 note for more detail).  The development of this panel was conducted with Universal Display (OLED), who has been on the blue phosphorescent material development path for years and is the key supplier of red and green organometallic phosphorescent emitters to the entire OLED industry.

Why is blue so hard?
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Commercialization of a blue phosphorescent emitter and host combination that does not rely on blue fluorescent support has proved to be a daunting task due to the high energy associated with blue photons (packets of electromagnetic energy).  These excited particles can break chemical bonds in their own molecules, degrading them, or can create new non-radiative molecules that reduce the efficiency of the blue emitter.  Additionally, the host material that the blue emitter sits in has to have a higher energy level than the blue emitter itself to keep energy from leaking back to the host as heat or non-radiative energy.  So finding a blue phosphorescent emitter that meets all specifications is only part of the process, as the host material  development can also be challenging.
So, we know the development of a blue phosphorescent emitter has been difficult to say the least, as some potential blue emitter materials have high efficiency and a deep blue color point but only last for a few minutes, while others have a longer lifetime, and proper color, but are too inefficient to be used commercially, and some have excellent efficiency and a long lifetime but can’t quite produce the deep blue that is needed.  While Universal Display has completed ‘commercial verification’ with LG Display, UDC continued to record blue emitter/host revenue in 1Q as ‘developmental’, which is required until the product using the material is commercially available.  As the timeline for LGD’s panel production is still unknown, the key to understanding whether the LGD panels are being used in a commercial device will be when UDC begins recording the blue material as ‘commercial’.
What about Samsung?
Obviously, there are other OLED panel manufacturers working to bring a full phosphorescent blue emitter to market, particularly Samsung Display (pvt), who is also working with UDC along with their own development team.  As the leader in small panel OLED displays, they have a very big stake in this process but tend to be a bit more ‘purist’ when it comes to OLED processes.  SDC did not believe that LG Display’s TV panel, which uses a single color OLED and a color filter to create red, green, and blue, was the right way to produce large panel (TV) OLED in 2013 and concentrated on smaller RGB OLED displays, eventually settling on a blue OLED with quantum dot s to create colors for their QD/OLED TVs.
As the LG Display panel uses both fluorescent and phosphorescent blue emitters, we suspect that the current blue phosphorescent host/emitter that LGD is using as part of its stack might not meet Samsung Display’s requirements yet.  Samsung would likely be most interested in using blue phosphorescent material in mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) where the higher efficiency of a phosphorescent blue emitter will be key to either a power consumption reduction or an improvement in brightness, but as mobile devices have individual sub-pixels for each color, we expect their requirements might be a bit more stringent.  That said, we do expect SDC will find a way to incorporate a blue phosphorescent system in some product this year.  It could be a similar fluorescent/phosphorescent blue emitter base for their QD/OLED TV/Monitor panels, or it could be a higher specification deep blue phosphorescent emitter for an RGB architecture for mobile devices, but we find it difficult to imagine that SDC will cede the first ‘blue year’ to LGD.
All of that said, changing from a blue fluorescent emitter to a phosphorescent emitter is much more complicated than just switching materials.  In a large panel (TV), the OLED materials are deposited across the entire panel and the driving circuitry is the same for every sub-pixel point, as each sub-pixel is the same (white) color until it reaches the color filter or quantum dot.  In current RGB (small panel) displays, the driver for the red and green sub-pixel can be the same but as the driving characteristics for the fluorescent sub-pixel (blue) as different, the circuitry for the blue driver is different, adding to complexity.  In an all phosphorescent RGB display, all three sub-pixel circuits can be the same (in theory), which means not only does the material stack change, but the driver circuitry also changes, adding another level of complexity to designing an all phosphorescent display.
Timeline?
Not only do all of these issues need to be worked out, but they also need to be tested both at the pilot level and in a mass production setting, and this can take time.  The issue then becomes where do they start?  Does the OLED producer have enough ‘spare’ capacity that they can convert a line to producing all phosphorescent RGB OLED displays, or are they capacity constrained enough that they cannot afford to dedicate a line to all phosphorescent OLED production?  As was the case when green phosphorescent emitter material became commercially available, adoption took time.  With the first commercial product using a phosphorescent green emitter was released in 2013, UDC’s green emitter sales increased but then stayed relatively flat for ~15 quarters, being adopted by one of two major customers. In 2017, sales increased as a second large customer adopted the material and continued to grow quickly through 2021.  While still growing to a lesser degree, as the industry has universally adopted green phosphorescent emitter  material, growth is more tied to capacity expansion and new product applications, although the adoption of multi-layer OLED displays could lead to incremental material sales.
Adoption?
So the question now becomes will the adoption take 15 months, as it did with green or will it be faster or slower?  These are essential questions for UDC’s longer-term prospects, as while OLED capacity growth continues, the addition of a third primary material revenue stream is a godsend for any material producer.  We expect the adoption of blue will be faster, but with some caveats.
Why faster?
Numbers – in 2013 there were two OLED producers, Samsung Display and LG Display.  Tianma (000050.CH) built their first OLED fab that year but did not ship commercial product and BOE (200725.CH), China’s largest OLED producer, did not build their first OLED fab until 2016, so the adoption of green phosphorescent emitter material was dependent on only two producing entities.  Now there are over a dozen producers, all of whom are looking to differentiate their OLED displays from others and blue is a perfect differentiator.
Experience –Samsung Display and LG Display had been involved with OLED display development for over 10 years when green phosphorescent emitter material was released commercially by UDC, yet much OLED production was still problematic, and yield was always an issue.  At that time making major changes to formulas, architecture, processes, and equipment meant a long learning curve before returning to decent production yields and carrying substantial losses that could erode potential funding and adoption.  The current experience level across the industry is considerably higher than 10 years ago and producers are more likely to see a change that could give them an edge over the competition as one they are willing to take after years of managing commercial production.
Quality – A true blue phosphorescent emitter will give display designers a greater ability to balance their systems.  As a more efficient material they can maintain brightness with less power and less power means longer battery life for mobile users and a longer lifetime for the material, putting a damper on the ever-present burn-in question.  They can maintain the current power level and produce a brighter display to compete with other display modalities that are encroaching on the OLED space, or they can use blue as a differentiator that will separate their display from those without blue phosphorescent emitters.
Advertising – The idea of the display industry is to sell displays, and in order to sell displays there have to be lots of products that use them.  As the display industry can find itself in a somewhat stagnant position, with few new enticements for consumers, any new technology affords the industry a shot at incremental unit sales. We expect the industry will be enamored with the promotion of blue when it starts and will start a new line of promotion for OLED devices to counteract Mini-LED, Quantum Dots, and eventually Micro-LED displays.  However unless there is a truly discernable difference between all phosphorescent displays and what we have now, price will remain the most important factor to consumers as the blue enthusiasm wears down.  UDC however will have a new revenue stream , one that can eventually be bigger than red or green.
Why bigger?
In order to produce white light in large OLED displays, one can combine a blue emitter and a yellow/green emitter and then send the light to a color filter to create red, green, and blue sub-pixels, essentially the way LG Display’s WOLED TV panels work.  Samsung Display’s QD/OLED panel is similar but based on a blue[1] OLED material that gets converted to red and green by quantum dots. Smaller devices use individual red, green and blue sub-pixels, directly creating all colors.  WOLED displays uses UDC’s yellow/green phosphorescent emitter with a blue fluorescent emitter.  If a phosphorescent blue emitter became available, UDC would have the potential to be able to put both materials in every WOLED TV.  In Samsung’s QD/OLED the blue material used is fluorescent, with UDC providing no substantial OLED emitter material.  If a phosphorescent blue emitter became available, UDC would have that potential new stream.  In RGB display (phones, tablets) the impact would not be as significant as UDC would only be adding a third phosphorescent emitter to the two they already supply, but the volumes are extremely high, so all in, UDC benefits unless someone comes up with a better phosphorescent blue.  That said, even in that scenario UDC still has device patents that cover the use of phosphorescent emitters in OLED devices, so they might lose the OLED material sale to someone else but should still be able to capture a device royalty stream as before.
Why Not?
Cost – Fluorescent emitter materials tend to be less expensive than phosphorescent ones.  In premium OLED displays, the additional cost can be absorbed, but as one migrates to lower price tiers, the cost will be more difficult to absorb, and adoption will be slower.  We expect however that many brands will bite the bullet and eat the additional material cost in order to compete, at least for some products.  The cost of converting formulas, structure, and process also must be considered, and some who have been producing OLED displays for years at a loss might hesitate, unless they can convince funding sources to foot the bill.
Complexity – While there are certainly issues that will make adding phosphorescent blue to OLED production more complex, at least at the onset, OLED producers are so used to phosphorescent materials that they will likely adapt to required changes more quickly
 So?
We note also that UDC has contracts with all major OLED producers.  Some are based on a flat fee license, and some are based on a per unit royalty, and some cover only current phosphorescent (red & green) emitters.  In some cases UDC will have to strike new deals for blue that follow current contract formats.  While developmental OLED materials are expensive their volumes are low, but when they become commercial, they tend to be priced according to volume, so large, early adopters could have an advantage over small lower volume producers, unless their current contracts cover ‘all phosphorescent materials’.  UDC will have to balance their production cost and volume tiers against their desire to encourage blue adoption, ideally setting smaller price/volume increments in the early years against the opposite in later years. 
All in, blue is good, especially for those who produce it, but regardless of the headlines that are calling for a new ‘blue’ era in the display world, we expect most investors will expect too much too soon.  Panel producers need to make money and if they are producing at profitable utilization levels, they are going to want to keep doing so as long as possible, putting aside any changes that might reduce volume or profitability.  Most will talk the ‘blue’ talk but the implementation might be a bit less than the rhetoric.  We believe the adoption of blue phosphorescent emitter material will certainly be a positive for the industry and for the consumer, but technology hype is just that whether it is AI hype, metaverse hype, or 5G hype.  How consumers see ‘blue’ will be the deciding factor as it always is.


[1] Actually a combination of fluorescent blue and phosphorescent green.

Warning…Thinking Caps on…
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​In an OLED device, a voltage is applied to the cathode, creating electrons and the opposite electrode produces holes.  Think of them as the cute girl sitting at one end of the bar and the svelte guy sitting at the other end.  When they see each other, they are immediately attracted to each other (opposites attract) and both get up and push their way through the crowd (OLED stack).  They meet on the dance floor (emitting material) where the magic happens.  They hold each other in a warm embrace (forming an exciton, a combination of an electron and an electron hole that is in an excited state) and dance in the spotlight (produce light) until the music stops.  They gaze into each other’s eyes and quietly head back to their seats on either side of the bar.  OLED devices play out this scenario over and over as long as there is a voltage at the electrodes.

Simple enough, right?  Now let’s move this conceptual production to an industrial setting.  There are two companies in Pixeltown, both producing the same thing, excitons.  Fluorescent Inc. produces four excitons on each production run, One singlet exciton (red) and three triplet excitons (blue), but their process is old, and they are only able to sell the singlet excitons to customers, throwing away all of the triplets, leading to a 25% efficiency rating and a serious trash problem that the Pixeltown mayor is not happy about. Phosphorescent Inc. uses the same basic equipment and produces the same initial output of one singlet exciton and three triplet excitons.  However, the folks at Phosphorescent Inc hired some smart guys who came up with a way to get their triplet excitons to act like singlet excitons, which allows them to sell all three triplets and one singlet for each run, for a nearly 100% efficiency rating. 
Sooner or later the folks at Fluorescent Inc (Factory a) figured out that they are going to go out of business, having such a low efficiency rating, and the economic impact to Pixeltown would be catastrophic.   Management hired a hot-shot banker and put out  some feelers but there were no takers until the banker’s lowly assistant figured out that if you were to combine both fluorescent and phosphorescent materials together when making excitons, the result would be even better than the two individually. 
Here’s why.  If the materials are carefully matched, the ability of Phosphorescent Inc’s process to use both triplet and singlet excitons to produce light, allows some of the triplet excitons that Fluorescent Inc produces but throws away (heat rather than light), to become useful.  This means that the combined fluorescent and phosphorescent emitters could have an efficiency that is higher than 25% for the fluorescent excitons and remain at 100% for phosphorescent excitons, essentially improving the efficiency of the combination by about 15%.  Not all of the fluorescent triplet excitons can be converted and used by the phosphorescent emitter, but enough to make a difference.

Why is this important?
LG Display (LPL) made an announcement today that will undoubtedly shake up things in the OLED space, but the devil is in the details and it is essential to understand how OLEDs work in order to quantify the announcement.  In fact the structure that LG Display is speaking about is similar to the tandem system that the company uses for production of small OLED displays for ‘a large customer’.  Typically, in order to improve brightness, the dual stack approach is used, essentially squeezing two OLED stacks between electrodes instead of one.  This helps, but is an expensive solution as OLED materials, particularly phosphorescent emitters, are costly, especially if you are duplicating the entire (RGB) stack, and increases the number of steps involved in the deposition process, which has a tendancy to reduce yield.
We believe the LG Display approach is both similar in that it uses a multi-stack approach, but it is also a bit different.  We expect that the phosphorescent blue host and dopant combination that LGD is using  would not stand on its own commercially quite yet, as it could possibly fall short on a particular commercial specification, any of three major categories, lifetime, efficiency, or color point.  Developers must balance these three factors when trying to create a stable phosphorescent emitter and that has been a difficult task for all.  Materials that have the necessary color point (deep blue) might have a lifetime that is too short to use commercially or be lacking in efficiency (high power usage).  Other materials that have a more extended lifetime might not have the necessary color point.  You get the idea.  So while the concept of using a combination of blue phosphorescent and blue fluorescent emitters has promise, it is an interim solution until a truly stable blue emitter and host combination can be found. 
LG Display was careful to call this iteration ‘a step closer’ and not a final solution, but it will certainly get LG Display some acclaim and cachet from the announcement.  The response from Samsung Display (pvt) will be interesting to see as they have been working on the same blue phosphorescent emitter with Universal Display (OLED) for years and at one time, years agho, evaluated a combination blue Phosphorescent/Fluorescent combination.  We also expect a response from both the TADF community and those developing quantum dot EL displays. 
Here's the LG Display Press release: (our highlights in red)
LG Display, the world’s leading innovator of display technologies, announced today that it has become the world’s first company to successfully verify the commercialization-level performance of blue phosphorescent OLED panels on a mass production line. The achievement comes about eight months after the company partnered with UDC to develop blue phosphorescence and is considered a significant step closer to realizing a “dream OLED” display.
In the display industry, “dream OLED” refers to an OLED panel that achieves phosphorescence for all three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue). OLED panel light emission methods are broadly categorized into fluorescence and phosphorescence. Fluorescence is a simpler process in which materials emit light immediately upon receiving electrical energy, but its luminous efficiency is only 25%. In contrast, phosphorescence briefly stores received electrical energy before emitting light. Although it is technically more complex, this method offers luminous efficiency of 100% and uses a quarter as much power as fluorescence.
However, achieving blue phosphorescence has remained a major challenge even more than 20 years after the commercialization of red and green phosphorescence. This is due to blue, among the three primary colors, having the shortest wavelength and demanding the greatest energy.
LG Display has solved this issue by using a hybrid two-stack Tandem OLED structure, with blue fluorescence in the lower stack and blue phosphorescence in the upper stack. By combining the stability of fluorescence with the lower power consumption of phosphorescence, it consumes about 15% less power while maintaining a similar level of stability to existing OLED panels.
In particular, LG Display is the first to succeed in reaching the commercialization stage of blue phosphorescent OLED panels, where performance evaluation, optical characteristics, and processability on actual mass production lines should all be confirmed. The company has already completed commercialization verification with UDC.
LG Display has independently filed patents for its hybrid blue phosphorescent OLED technology in both South Korea and the United States.
The company will showcase a blue phosphorescent OLED panel featuring two-stack Tandem technology at SID Display Week 2025, the world’s largest display event, in San Jose, California from May 11th (local time).
At the show, LG Display will be unveiling a blue phosphorescent OLED panel featuring two-stack Tandem technology applied to a small and medium-sized panel that can be applied to IT devices such as smartphones and tablets. As more and more products require high definition and high efficiency such as AI PCs and AR/VR devices, the application of blue phosphorescence technology is expected to expand rapidly.
“The successful commercialization of blue phosphorescence technology, which has been called the final piece of the ‘dream OLED’ puzzle, will become an innovative milestone towards the next generation of OLED,” said Soo-young Yoon, CTO and Executive Vice President of LG Display. “We expect to secure a leading position in the future display market through blue phosphorescence technology.”
Based on LG Display’s IP here’s what we think the configurations might be… 

Earlier this week we noted that LG Display (LPL) was shifting its OLED stack configuration from a 3-stack structure to a 4-stack structure.  As shown in the comparison below, LGD has removed the middle emitter stack, which was a combination of red, yellow/green, and green emitters, and added a full green stack and a full red stack.  In theory, this gives more control over stack output, allowing the individual color (RGB) peaks to be higher, leading to higher color volume[1], and narrower peaks for each color.  Typically, narrow peaks reduce the amount of adjacent color that the emitter produces, which allows for more energy to go to the precise color intended, without requiring more power.
We note that while the stack comparison simplifies the structure of the OLED displays to make them easier to understand, the complexity of these displays is considerable and the precise nature of the control necessary to produce each layer is quite daunting, as the layers are typically between 10nm and 80nm thick, depending on the type of layer and the material chosen.  We also note that stack engineers and scientists have a large number of materials to choose from for each layer, making the number of possible combinations astronomical.  As an example, below is a list of some of the materials that can be used for just the Hole Injection layer (you can’t get these at the local pharmacy), so it can be seen that with eight structural layer types and 17 layers, even this generic 3-stack model is incredibly complex.  Even limiting the number of choices to 5 materials for each structure, the number of possible combinations are over 390,000 and there are typically many more than 5 choices of materials for each structure.  While the layer-by-layer details for a 4-stack panel have not been disclosed by LG Display, we expect at least 5 more layers will be needed, adding to process time and cost.
MTDATA - 4,4',4''-Tris(N-carbazolyl)-triphenylamine
CuPc - Copper (II) phthalocyanine
TCTA - 4,4',4''-Tris(carbazol-9-yl) triphenylamine
HATCN - 2-(4-Biphenylyl)-5-(4-tert-butylphenyl)-1,3,4-oxadiazole
TDAPB - 4,4'-bis[N-(1-naphthyl)-N-phenylamino] biphenyl
PEDOT: PSS - Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate)
   
Panasonic (6752.JP) is the first TV brand to be using these new panels, and while they have not explicitly stated that the panels are from LG Display, it would be hard to imagine otherwise, but the company has not indicated when the three sizes (55”, 65”, 77”) will be released, other than some time in 2025, nor have they given price information, but we trust they are coming this year.  LG (066730.KS) has stated that their 2025 G5 OLED TV line will contain “Brightness Booster Ultimate” technology, and while they have not explicitly stated that those sets would be using the 4-stack OLED panels, we make the same assumption.  That said, LG’s G3 line contains 48”, 55”, 65”, 77”, 83”, and 97” models, so it is possible that some might not use the 4-stack panels this year.
Again, while this might seem a small matter to those outside of the display space, it will push forward the quality of OLED displays and intensify the competition between OLED and LCD (Mini-LED in particular).  Large panel OLED displays have been criticized for not being as bright as LCDs, so any increase in brightness increases the value of large panel OLED displays, making them a better choice for brands going forward.  Hopefully, the actuality of the 4-stack approach meets the promotion it will get in the TV space, especially with consumers later this year, making the added manufacturing cost worthwhile.
 


[1] Color volume is a measure of the display’s ability to reproduce a wide range of colors at various brightness levels, essentially a combination of hue (color), saturation (how much white is mixed in) and brightness (luminence), which is the intensity of the color.

​There are many ways to produce OLED displays. Small OLED displays can be produced using a red, green, and blue stripe to produce a pixel that can reproduce millions of colors. Some create small OLED displays by patterning RGB OLED material dots in a variety of configurations, each with its own positives and negatives, but large OLED displays, such as those for TVs or monitors are another story.  LG Display stacks a number of OLED materials on top of each other across the entire TV and uses a color filter to create colored sub-pixels.  Samsung Display does something similar, but uses different OLED materials and then uses quantum dots to convert the light into colors.
While the techniques for creating small and large OLED displays are different, they both have to compete with other display technologies, particularly LCD and its more recent kin, Mini-LED TV.  OLED TVs tend to have richer colors and higher contrast than LCD TVs but they tend to be less bright than LCD TVs, and are more expensive to produce, so large panel OLED producers are always looking for ways to improve brightness.  There are micro-lenses that can be used to pull more light from the display and dozens of other techniques that will work toward improving brightness, but the most important focus for improving large panel OLED display brightness are the emitting materials themselves.
OLED material producers are constantly working to improve characteristics, and while new OLED materials with better characteristics are always being developed, brightness improvements are often a tradeoff against material lifetime or color accuracy and cost, yet the competitive nature of the display business forces OLED display producers to keep making improvements to counter the competition.  One way of doing such is to use more OLED material.  LG Display’s original WOLED displays were formed of three stacks of OLED materials in layers.  Each stack was composed of blue and yellow/green emitters.  That combination produced white light, which was then passed through a color filter of red, green, and blue phosphors, each removing the opposing colors.  The prolem with this method is that it is subtractive and results is considerably less light reaching the viewer.
Over time a red emitter was added to the stacks to improve the quality of the white light, but in order to maintain brightness after the color filter, a blank space is left on the color filter, allowing a white sub-pixel to be added to each pixel.  While this improved the overall brightness, it also washed out some of the colors.  LG Display has now decided to add a fourth stack to its upcoming displays by separating some of the emittercolors in the stacks into there own stacks.  This concept adds additional emitter material, which adds to the light outrput (brightness) and allows for more control over the ‘tuning’ of each layer.
Samsung Display (pvt) has a different method for producing large panel OLED displays.  They coat the entire panel with OLED emitter materials, in the same way LGD does, but the combination of materials produces blue light rather than white light.  The blue light is passed to red and green quantum dots, which shift the blue light to red and green, and  a space allow the blue light to pass through unchanged.  While there is some loss from the qualntum dot conversion, they convert rather than filter, so a white pixel is not needed and the colors tend to be truer.
That said, LCD displays are based on backlights and OLED displays are self-generating, so regardless of the method used, OLED displays tend to be less bright, and driving them harder with a higher current just reduces their lifetime, so Samsung Display is doing the same thing as LG Display and adding an additional stack of blue  light generating OLED material to its QD/OLED displays, starting with its smaller OLED monitors.  Consumers will benefit from the extra stacks from both producers, as will the OLED material suppliers, although the uptake will not be overnight, however the bigger question will be how the additional stack will affect the price of the displays.  OLED emitter materials are expensive so we expect producers will have to eat the cost at the onset, but if the concept of adding stacks makes enough difference that consumers are more comfortable with OLED, than it will be worth the cost.  We expect the answer will take at least a year to surface, and while the idea of adding stacks might seem nuanced to the average user, if it is able to increase the brightness of an OLED display by 20% or 25%, it will make a big difference in the battle between OLED and LCD over time.

​TV brands are notorius for aggressive marketing, and that sometimes leads to marketing that is on the edge of being deceptive.  Last year Samsung added a number of models to its OLED line that used a technology that was significantly different from Samsung’s own QD-OLED display technology.  These sets were, and still are, based on WOLED technology, and purchased from LG Display (LPL), who has been using that technology for years, while those based on Samsung’s QD/OLED technology function completely differently.  Samsung has said little about the fact that the company markets both technologies as OLED line, but does not specify which technologies are used in each of the company’s three OLED lines and various OLED TV sizes.  In fact, certain models and sizes can have different technologies based on the location where purchased, without the customer knowing which technology they are purchasing., and while Samsung says it guarentees the quality of all of its OLED TVs, if one is looking to purchase a QD/OLED Samsung TV, they could wind up with something else.
Of course, Samsung is certainly not the only one who plays these marketing games and with the announcements of new 2025 TV lines at CES, it seems that LG (066570.KS) has declided that product names do not necessarily mean what they seem.  LG has been marketing its high-end LCD TVs as ‘QNED TVs’ for a number of years, which implies that they are quantum dot enhanced (the Q in QNED), yet it seems that this years QNED TV lines are not quantum dot enhanced but rather use software to enhance color reproduction and contain no quantum dots.  Consumers, who assume that QNED still means quantum dot enhanced, will find no quantum dot films, bars, polarizers, or color converters in their new LG LCD TVs, despite the fact that they continue to be sold under the QNED name.
It seems that in November of last year Hansol (014680.KS), a Korean specialty chemical producer and supplier of quantum dots for displays to both South Korean display producers, filed a complaint with the South Korean FTC alleging that a number of TCL’s (000100.CH) LCD TV sets, which are labeled as ‘QD’ models, do not contain the elements necessary for quantum dots.  While TCL denies the claim, they are being investigated under false advertising statutes. 
All in, every time a TV brand tries to slip something past consumers, it erodes both individual brand trust and trust in the CE space overall, giving consumers another reason to hesitate when making purchases.  With a number of TV technologies available to consumers currently, decision-making has become far more difficult than just a few years ago, and brands that keep things simple for consumers will likely maintain a steady user base that will return in each cycle.  When we spend time in retail stores listening to consumers speak with salespersons about TV buying choices, it becomes evident that most are buying based on price, and are taking the word of the salesperson or something they read on the internet in terms of the technology, so even the hint that they might have made a bad decision once the set is home can cause the consumer to abandon that brand forever.  It is hard to imagine that a salesperson could not make a case for or against quantum dots, WOLED, QD-OLED, or Mini-LED when trying to close a sale, so it would seem that there is little point in trying to hide the facts from consumers, but that’s our opinion, not that of brand executives or marketing teams…

Back in August we noted a few points about the development and adoption of blue phosphorescent OLED materials (“Singing the Blues”) and also indicated some hesitancy about the excitement that had gathered around the pending development of a blue phosphorescent OLED emitter material next year.  While the development of same by a number of companies, including Universal Display (OLED), Samsung Display (pvt), Sumitomo Chemical (4005.JP), Idemitsu Kosan (5019.JP), Merck (MRK), and Lumiotec (pvt), as well as a number of well-known universities, continues, the actual adoption of a blue phosphorescent material into a commercial OLED stack is a more difficult task and one that is likely not to adhere to the aggressive timelines than many hope for.
Universal Display began reporting commercial revenue from phosphorescent emitters in late 2005, primarily from its red emitter.  Previously the company’s sales came from developmental materials sold to customers and developmental contracts.  The first color OLED smartphone was the Samsung (005930.KS) X120, released in 1Q 2004, which had a 1.8” OLED display, was able to reproduce 65,000 colors, with a resolution of 128 x 128 pixels., and the following year BenQ (2352.TT) released the A520, which sported a 1.5” OLED display (128 x 128) and a smaller 96 x 96 display.  To compare that to what is available currently, the Xiaomi (1810.HK) 14 Pro released this month has a 6.73” OLED display that can reproduce 68 billion colors and has a resolution of 3200 x 1440 pixels.
We have been tracking sales of Universal Display’s OLED materials for more than 10 years and while the company announced its first commercial green phosphorescent green emitter material in the summer of 2010, Samsung Display, UDC’s biggest customer did not release a smartphone using both red and green phosphorescent emitters until the Galaxy S4 in April of 2013, almost 3 years later.  We expect Samsung Display had integrated the green emitter into the display stack for some time before the stack was stable enough to be used commercially, and while the OLED industry is far more adept at making stack material changes, we expect there will be a learning curve with blue phosphorescent emitter material when it is made available commercially.
At a seminar yesterday in South Korea, UBI research, a local consultancy, stated that Samsung Display had set a goal of applying blue phosphorescent OLED material to devices in the 2nd half of 2025, rather than in mid-2024 as previously expected.  We believe this is in reference to materials being developed by SDC, and while we assume they are working with UDC on that development, that remains unconfirmed.  UBI went on to state that they believed the current version of SDC’s blue phosphorescent emitter material is not efficient enough to be used as is, although they believe that SDC would be willing to use a more efficient version, even if the lifetime was only 55% of the fluorescent emitter materials it will replace.  Given that color point (deep blue), efficiency, and lifetime are all variables that determine the commercial success of an emitter material, it has been difficult to ‘blend’ the three major parameters to create a commercially viable blue phosphorescent emitter material.
To complicate matters further, the other components of the OLED stack, most of which are developed and produced by other material suppliers, must also work efficiently with the OLED emitter materials, and that combination must be formulated by the panel producer.  UDC and others will develop their blue phosphorescent emitter with host materials, but there are typically at least 4 layers (usually more) of additional materials that create the environment under which the emissive materials work best, so even if a panel producer decides to use a commercial blue phosphorescent emitter, all of the layers in the stack are likely to be redesigned to produce the most efficient stack combination, a time consuming task, and one that involves considerable testing. 
Why Blue?  The quest for a blue phosphorescent emitter material is not a frivolous one, as a proper phosphorescent blue emitter will improve the stack’s power efficiency.  Estimates seem to range for an improvement of between 20% and 35%, although we expect that the actual result will depend on both the blue material specs and the other stack emitters and materials.  Anything that can reduce the power consumption of a mobile device is of immense value to device designers who can add additional hardware or functionality or reduce the size of the battery, while maintaining or improving the overall display specifications. 
Why has it been so hard?  UDC and others have been on the trail of a blue phosphorescent emitter material for almost as long as commercial OLED materials have been around, but like other ‘blue’ structures, such as blue LEDs, the characteristics that create blue light are specific to what are known as ‘high bandgap’ materials.  In an OLED device, ‘holes’ (think: ‘anti-electrons’) are injected into the stack at the Highest Occupied Molecular Level (HOMO), while electrons are injected at the Lowest Unoccupied Molecular Level (LUMO), with the space between those two ‘points’ called the bandgap.  As the world of electronics always strives toward a neutral state, the two ‘migrate’ to the bandgap mid-point and when they pair, they release light energy and cancel each other.  The frequency (color) of that light energy is proportional to the size of the ’gap’ between HUMO and LUMO, with larger gaps creating higher (blue) frequencies and small gaps creating lower (red) frequencies.
Unfortunately, the larger the bandgap, the more unstable the materials tend to be, which means they have short lifetimes, just as in nature animals or insects with high metabolic rates tend to have shorter lifetimes than those with slower rates, and this has been a fundamental problem for OLED material scientists.  In theory, a lighter blue should be more stable and have a longer lifetime, but a deep blue is essential to balance the phosphorescent red and green already being used in RGB OLED displays, so the quest to find a material with a large bandgap with a stable structure continues.  Eventually a material will be found that meets the necessary criteria, but once it becomes commercialized, it will take time to find its way into OLED stack, just the way green phosphorescent emitter material did, along with the more predictable issues surrounding cost, availability, and IP that overhang current OLED emitter materials.  It’s coming and its going to create a stir when it does, but aside from the initial hoopla, blue phosphorescent OLED emitter material is just a part of the OLED stack and will be subject to the same starts and stops as other OLED materials.

The holy grail in the OLED material space is phosphorescent blue emitter material, with the reason being that in current RGB OLED displays (all OLED smartphones and IT devices but not OLED TVs) the OLED stack is comprised of a Red phosphorescent emitter, a green phosphorescent emitter, and a blue fluorescent emitter.  The nuance between phosphorescent and fluorescent is a big one in the OLED material space as broadly, fluorescent materials generate less light per unit of energy than phosphorescent ones.  By converting the blue fluorescent emitter material currently used in most OLED stacks, to a phosphorescent one, the amount of power consumed by the emitter stack could be reduced by ~25%, an important point for mobile devices, and with numerous labs and companies working toward the commercialization of a blue phosphorescent emitter, the long-term stakes are high.
It seems that the average investor believes that when blue phosphorescent emitter material is commercialized, the winner of the race, whoever that might be, is due to see a windfall in terms of OLED material sales, but while we believe that is the case over time, we are less sanguine about an immediate and significant jump in revenue from blue phosphorescent sales, as both physics and marketing must be figured into such equations. 
There are two factors that come into play when planning OLED pixels.  First is the efficiency of the materials, or their ability to convert electrical energy into light, and the 2nd is the eye’s sensitivity to each color.  If we assume the efficiency of both red and green phosphorescent emitter materials is the same (its not), for both colors to look equally bright to the huma eye, the pixel would contain two times the amount of red material to green material, but in practice that ratio is closer to 2 (red) to 3 (green), and again assuming the same efficiency for blue phosphorescent material, the theoretical ratio for blue would be only 16.3% of red, or 33% of green. So if red emitter cost $1,000 per kilogram (arbitrary price), the theoretical cost of a display that used 1 gram of red emitter would be $1.67, consisting of $1.00 of red, $0.50 of green, and $0.17 of blue, remembering that these are theoretical not practical ratios.
Back to reality, just by looking at a common pentile pixel layout, those ratios are not even close, especially as the efficiency of fluorescent blue (currently used) is considerably lower than that of (hopefully) phosphorescent blue, so ‘more’ fluorescent blue is needed currently to make up for that inefficiency, which leads to the idea that if fluorescent blue is replaced by a more efficient phosphorescent blue emitter, wouldn’t that mean that less blue is needed?  If all were of equal efficiency, yes, but that is certainly not the case with OLED materials. 
OLED material developers must find a balance between three major factors.  Color point (such as deep blue, not sky blue), efficiency, the ability to convert energy applied to light, and lifetime, or how long it takes for the material to degrade to a set point.  Finding a true deep blue phosphorescent material is not an impossible task, but finding one that has a reasonable efficiency is much harder, and finding one that is deep blue, with a high efficiency, but does not degrade in a few hours is very difficult, so material scientists continue to wrestle with materials until the right combination is found.  Even at that point however, we don’t know what the efficiency of this new blue phosphorescent material will be, and that will be a determinant in how much blue phosphorescent emitter material is needed to balance existing red and green phosphorescent emitter materials, which will also determine how much blue phosphorescent emitter material an OLED panel producer must buy when incorporating it in a new OLED display, so the variables are truly ‘variable’.
With all of those physical issues, there is another one as important, and that is the manufacturing cost of this new blue material.  Again, in theory, the amount of heavy metal, in this case iridium, needed to produce the increasingly higher energy levels of green and blue emitters, would make a phosphorescent blue emitter more expensive to produce than green or red, and under the assumption that the cost of raw materials for emitters is ~40%, this does represent a bit of an incremental cost, along with a relatively immature manufacturing process and considerable R&D that needs to be amortized, so the price/kg of a blue phosphorescent emitter is going to have to be higher than red or green.
That said, while the cost of a blue phosphorescent emitter material will be higher than that of a fluorescent blue emitter, less will be needed (in theory) unless the efficiency is low, which will make the changeover less onerous from a total OLED stack cost.  However it is important to understand that the adoption of a blue phosphorescent emitter material will not happen overnight, just as the adoption of a green phosphorescent material took time, as shown below.  While we expect the idea of being able to reduce power consumption by 25% or have an OLED display that is brighter than is currently possible, will be an attraction to OLED panel producers, but implementing new OLED materials into existing manufacturing processes takes time and considerable effort, and could affect yield for an extended period of time.  Typically such a change would be implemented on a single line, so once the new materials are proven, they would be expanded across other lines over time.
All in, while it will be exciting to see a commercial blue phosphorescent emitter material to complete the OLED stack, we hesitate to build in the high early expectations that are typical in the OLED space and take a more conservative view of how such a new material will be adopted.  With Universal Display (OLED) expected to have an all-phosphorescent stack commercially available next year, expectations will be high, but we expect adoption to the levels seen for current red and green phosphorescent emitter materials will take some time and investors should be wary of building in high expectations at the onset.

Years ago we saw a mock-up of an OLED device that looked like a large pen.  It had a tab that allowed the user to pull out a flexible OLED display that showed full color images and text, as if you were reading a magazine or newspaper., which you could wirelessly update or switch pages with the press of a button.  As one who has spent many hours on trains commuting to and from work, the idea of such a device remained a futuristic but eminently achievable industry goal in our minds, and we have followed the display space closely ever since. 
It seems that we are getting ever closer to that dream as Samsung Display (pvt) promises to show an updated version of their flexible and rollable displays at the upcoming SID show next week.  The product is called Rollable Flex, and while it is similar to other SDC display products, and those of other display manufacturers, it takes the rollable concept a bit further.  Typically rollable displays are able to expand their surface area by 3x by maintaining a wide circumference around a drum, or in some cases folding across the interior of a device, however the folks at SDC have come up with a display that is able to be more tightly ‘wound’ around a cylinder without damage, and is able to expand its surface area by 5x, with the show demo being 49mm (1.9”) long when rolled to 254.4mm (10.01”) long when unrolled by wrapping it tightly around a cylinder.
While rollable OLED displays exist currently, they do not have the physical characteristics to be tightly wound without showing stress and eventual more serious damage.  While all of the materials in an OLED stack have their own ‘modulus of elasticity’, a fancy way of saying its resistance to being deformed, much of an OLED display’s flexibility is not determined by its substrate but by the material used to create the OLED stack’s anode.  The anode must be transparent if the light from the OLED emitters is to exit the pixel, and the most common material for OLED anodes is ITO, or indium Tin Oxide, which it typically sputtered[1] onto the substrate.  ITO is unusual in that it has both high electrical conductivity and optical transparency, a rare combination, along with ability to be finely etched, however the material is also brittle, the antithesis of what is needed for rollable displays, and is also permeable enough to allow oxygen and water vapor into the OLED stack, which destroys OLED materials.
In rigid OLED displays, the ITO is deposited on glass, and with a second ‘base’ glass substrate, locks the ITO and other OLED materials away from oxygen and water, however rollable displays must be built on flexible substrates which leaves the ITO and other material open to damage.  The solution for this issue is ‘layer’ other impermeable but transparent materials over the ITO, a process called encapsulation, solving the contamination issue.  That said, ITO’s brittleness is still an issue, and we expect SDC has come up with either an ITO substitute or modified ITO mixture that allows the material to have a higher elasticity modulus that exceeds that of current materials, and the odds are that SDC will not reveal the details of the difference from ‘normal’ and less flexible OLED stack components.
While this is all technical, it does pave the way for progressively smaller rollable devices and puts into sight the one-day pocket pen that opens into a large, full color display.  Samsung has already patented a number of ‘hybrid’ devices that use a rolled OLED display and a mechanical pull-out frame that holds the display when open, but these are typically the size of smartphones when closed, still a reach from the pocket-pen newspaper.


[1] Sputtering is a process  that involves the creation of plasma that ionizes the mater5ial (source) which forces the molecules out of the source  and on to a target material as a thin film.

​Universal Display (OLED) indicated that they will be showing, for the first time, a demo of their OVJP (Organic Vapor Jet Printing Systems), which the company has had in development for a number of years.  Based on a series of patents developed by the University of Michigan, University of Southern California, and Princeton University, with whom UDC has IP sharing agreements, particularly with work done by Dr. Mark E. Thompson and Professor Stephen Forrest, early OLED researchers.   OVJP differs from more typical OLED material deposition methods which use fine metal masks, essentially screens, to pattern OLED materials. OVJP heats the materials into a vapor, mixes the material with a carrier gas, and sends it to a print head that precisely places the material. 
As opposed to ink-jet printing, which mixes the OLED materials with a solvent, OVJP uses existing vaporization technology and direct printing, but does not liquify the OLED material, nor mix it with a solvent.  OLED materials that are miscible in solvents have different characteristics than immiscible OLED materials, which means formulations must be tailored to IJP systems, while OVJP can use the same OLED material sources as current mask-based deposition systems.  While the idea of OVJP has been around for some time, it has never been commercially developed until Universal Display took up the cause officially in 2014 when it created OVJP Corp. to design and build a commercial OVJP system.
OVJP is run by Jeff Hawthorne, former CEO of Photon Dynamics, a producer of automated inspection equipment for the display space that was acquired by Orbotech for $290, who was later purchased by KLA-Tencor (KLAC).   Company is still in the early stages of OVJP development, with the development of modules that will eventually become an alpha system, but the company will show its first 200mm x 500mm OVJP demo on a glass substrate, along with a 7-layer mono-color phosphorescent OLED device that was made-up on an OVJP R&D system, which will point to ‘proof-of-concept’ for the process.  The next step in OVJP development will be assembling an alpha system of size, likely about 6x the surface area of the current demo, and eventually scaling the system to commercial production sizes.
As the OVJP concept is one that is based on two existing technologies, it is not a far-fetched concept and essentially takes the best parts of both.  However there is substantial engineering involved and considerable competition from other deposition technologies and alternative materials, which are also in development.  The risk to UDC on OVJP is that other developments obviate the need for OVJP before it is commercially viable, so time is certainly a factor in its development, but the demos being shown by UDC do indicate progress is being made which is certainly encouraging.

​eMagin (EMAN) and Samsung Display have announced a merger agreement under which SDC will purchase all of eMagin’s outstanding stock at $2.08, roughly a 10% premium to the closing price on May 16.  This values eMagin at ~$218m.  eMagin has been developing Micro-OLED displays since 1996, with considerable funding from the US military who has used their displays in military hardware, particularly night-vision goggles, and in 2004 released the first consumer-oriented OLED Micro-display that was used in an early Sony (SNE) VR headset.  eMagin, which is based in Hopewell Junction, NY at a former IBM (IBM) site,
eMagin currently produces a variety of full color Micro-OLED displays that range from VGA to 2Kx2K micro-OLED displays ranging in size from 0.47” to 1”.  Samsung’s interest likely stems from eMagin’s dPd OLED patterning technology that is part of its patent portfolio.  The technology allows for RGB side-by-side stripe patterning, rather than a white OLED Micro-display that uses a color filter to create sub-pixels.  Samsung is expected to adopt this type of Micro-OLED display technology in the future, although it will likely initially use the WOLED system until the dPd technology can be scaled to nigh volume production.  Upper management are former Eastman Kodak (KODK) executives who were involved in Kodak’s early work with OLED displays.
While major investors are Vanguard (pvt), Blackrock (BLK) and company management and directors, the largest single shareholder is the Stillwater Trust LLC, whose sole member is Mortimer D.A. Sackler, former (left in 2018) 20-year director of the notorious Purdue Pharma LLC, the developers, and marketers of oxycontin, considered a major cause of the national opioid crisis.  You don’t always get to choose who your shareholders are…