Reports from China, quoted by the OLED Info blog have said that AUO of Taiwan is looking at building an OLED production line based on inkjet printer technology for monitors and automotive applications. The report identifies JOLED as the supplier of the equipment (which would be unsurprising as JOLED said recently that it wanted to develop a business to supply the technology JOLED to Help OLED TV Making and Adds Shareholders). Although AUO had considered building a flexible OLED fab, but decided against because of nervousness about capacity.
The report suggests that one possibility is that AUO will convert one of its existing LCD lines to make the OLEDs.
Analyst Comment
For those new to the industry, inkjet printing has long been seen as a key technology for OLED manufacture, but it has proved extremely difficult to get to commercialisation, although the technology has been close to good enough for fifteen years or so. Just not quite close enough. If you could inkjet, you could get much better usage of the very expensive OLED materials and possibly overcome the issues of making bigger panels that have plagued Samsung’s efforts to use vapour deposition for large sizes. If you could do that, you could avoid the horribly inefficient ‘kludge’ that LG uses to make large OLEDs manufacturable at all. (BR)
