DisplaySearch Blog

Toshiba, Sharp Hitachi, Canon, Matsushita Samsung and Samsung SDI Deliver OLED News

by Barry Young, Senior Advisor and Consultant

The month of December was filled with groundbreaking and confusing news, which is an indicator of just how significant OLEDs are becoming:

• Hitachi, Canon and Matsushita announced a new alliance to work on OLEDs.
• Toshiba announced that it cannot produce a 30” AMOLED TV by 2009, because OLEDs are too expensive or too power hungry or too difficult.
• Sharp and Toshiba announced an alliance, whereby Toshiba will a guaranteed source of TFT LCD TVs and Sharp will get chips.
• Samsung announced that they had produced a 40” AMOLED TV that might or might not be shown at the upcoming CES show in Las Vegas.
• Samsung announced that they had produced a 31” AMOLED TV that might or might not be shown at the upcoming CES show in Las Vegas.
• Samsung, SDI announced that they had produced a 31” AMOLED TV that would be shown at the upcoming CES show in Las Vegas.
• And of course, Sony sold out its first two shipments of the XEL-1 in Japan.

If you are confused, you are not alone. It seems that the announcements are designed to distract the reader, and probably needs some type of translation so here goes.

First, the alliance between Matsushita, Hitachi and Canon to jointly develop the next generation of ultra-thin flat panels, is an apparent bid to catch up to Sony’s lead in the AMOLED technology. This alliance makes a lot of sense:

Hitachi has become a small player in the TFT LCD game, compared to Samsung, LG.Philips, AUO and Sharp and has chosen not to enter the battle for the largest substrate.

Matsushita, the leading supplier of PDP panels, cannot compete in the <40” TV market.

Canon, which buys 50 million displays a year for its cameras, printers and other consumer devices, has already made a big commitment to OLEDs by buying Tokki but needs a source of backplanes.

As a result of the alliance, Matsushita gets access to more TFT LCD capacity for TVs in the short term, Canon gets a source of active matrix backplanes for its consumer OLED display business and Hitachi gets to share the costs of its TFT LCD business and more customers. Matsushita, which has been working on polymer OLEDs, and Canon and Hitachi, small molecule organizations, will have to harmonize their efforts. In the long term, the development of AMOLEDs for small/medium should lead to a significant TV effort. The alliance currently has a 9.3% share of TV units and 10.7% share of TV revenue.

The Toshiba announcement is a little more complicated due to the joint venture between Toshiba and Matsushita in TMDisplay. First as we reported earlier, TMDisplay was surprised when Toshiba President Katsuji Fujita announced that they would produce a 30” AMOLED TV by 2009. TMD had neither the technology not the capital to be in a position to make 30” display is 2009. TMDisplay was working on Polymer OLEDs which have performance that is approximately half small molecule phosphorescent material and would require a mature ink jet printing process to be functional. While IJP has been demonstrated, there are no commercial displays that currently use the technology. So TMDisplay would have to risk building at least a Gen 5 Fab for the backplanes and an OLED IJP Fab for the front planes. The investment would be at least US$1B in equipment and at least US$500M in R&D. But Toshiba would need the support of Matsushita, a minority investor in TMDisplay. But Matsushita found a more effective and less risky approach by using small molecule material and its new alliance. So Toshiba announced that OLEDs are too expensive and too power hungry so far for them to invest. As to AMOLED TVs, UDC modeled the power consumption of small molecule 32” AMOLEDs and found that the OLEDs could be as little as half the power consumption of a TFT LCD, which is specced at 85W, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 32″ AMOLED TV Power Consumption

Source: UDC

So with no proven technology, no partner and a limited source of TFT LCD TV panels, Toshiba opted for an expansion of their pre-existing accord with Sharp in production, in a further effort to advance their market positions in the sector. Toshiba will use Sharp’s LCD panels in its 30” and larger sets, while Sharp will use Toshiba’s chips in its own televisions.

The Samsung announcements seemed to be more internal confusion than anything else. Samsung, no doubt, would like to be the leader in new flat panel technology, and have been working in developing large area AMOLEDs for some time. Samsung is even collaborating with an equipment maker to develop a Gen 5 front plane process using white material together with a color filter. However, Samsung was not ready to demonstrate the 40” display and although it would have been quite a coup at CES, they opted out. So needing an AMOLED TV, Samsung’s TV group went to Samsung SDI and asked them to produce the largest AMOLED TV they could, which turned out to be 31”. So the formal announcement was made: Samsung would show a 31” AMOLED TV at CES. However, the announcement was erroneous, because it indicated that Samsung Electronics would be making the 31” and the 40” AMOLED TV. The error was corrected and it is now clear that they will be showing at CES a 31” AMOLED TV made by Samsung SDI. Moreover, now that Samsung SDI has been able to demonstrate their ability to make large area displays, while Samsung Electronics is still in the early stages of R&D, Samsung SDI announced a roadmap that included MP of 14” AMOLED TVs in 2008 and development plans for 14” to 15.4” Notebook panels and 20-23” panels for monitors in 2009 and 40” to 42” 1080P AMOLED TVs in 2010.

Table 1 Specifications of the 31″ AMOLED TV to be demonstrated at CES

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites