A coalition of companies has been created in Taiwan to take advantage of the opportunities in the OLED market.
The Organic Light-emitting Diode Lighting Commercialisation Alliance (OLCA) will aim to connect companies across the development chain and cement Taiwan’s existing expertise in OLED production.
The OLCA been established by Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a non-profit R&D organization whose objective it to transform Taiwan’s economy from depending on labour-intensive industries to high-tech industries.
Major OLED companies including Merck, RiTDisplay, Semiconductor Inc, Tongtai, Corning and WiseChip have already joined the organisation.
The OLCA will have five committees covering different technical aspects necessary to make OLED lighting directly competitive with standard LED and fluorescent lamp lighting. The committees will cover lamps, materials, lighting design, fixtures and optical engines.
ITRI expressed its confidence in OLED by predicting that the market will reach US$5.6 billion in 2020, 23.4 per cent of a projected total solid-state lighting market of $23.9 billion.
The news comes shortly after LG Chem announced a 66 per cent drop in its OLED panel prices and Philips introduced significantly brighter panels to the market. In the latter part of 2014 Konica Minolta will launch the world’s first roll-to-roll OLED manufacturing line which will further increase capacity and choice for OEMs and end-users.
A recent report by UBI, a South Korean research company, predicted OLED performance would be an a par with LED performance by 2015, but this was disputed by one manufacturer who thought 2016 was a more realistic figure.
Another report by Cambridge firm Cintelliq predicted that OLED panels will be priced at €200 per m2 by 2020 and will operate at a brightness of 5,000cd per m2. It also predicted that worldwide OLED panel production may exceed 500 million 100mm x 100mm panel equivalents by 2023
