Last year, at SID, Cynora forecast that it would ‘commercialise’ the blue TADF material by the end of 2017 (Cynora Promises High-Efficiency Blue TADF OLED in 2017). Following the show, LG and Samsung were confirmed as investors, so there was some optimism that the company might have solved some issues.
We contacted the firm at the beginning of 2018, but it decided to not immediately comment, as it was planning to present at a conference. After the OLED China event, the firm, sent us a progress report. It told us that it has now got to 21% EQE with a ‘CIE y value of 0.18’. The company said that it is ‘getting close to customer requests’. The company said that there are three parameters that it needs to meet.
- Efficiency – this is now achieved, the company said, as the commercial target is 15%.
- Colour – the company said that it is ‘95% of the way there’. It said that customers would accept something in the range of CIE y of 0.10 to 0.16.
- Lifetime – it is ‘moving into (the) same range as commercial’.
In terms of lifetime, the company said that it has achieved a lifetime of 10 hours to 97% brightness for 700 cd/m² and that ‘commercialisation is still planned in 2018’.
Cynora has over 100 staff and will add more people as it strives to meet the revised date of the end of 2018 for commercialisation.
Analyst Comment
The lifetime is now less than was reported in 2017, although efficiency and colour has improved. The challenge is to manage to achieve all three parameters as they are interdependent. At SID, UDC had said that although Cynora was saying that it could achieve the right blue, ‘it would find it very hard to change it’. It seems that this has proved to be true and that, as we have seen before, material development is very ‘non-linear’ with periods of very slow development.
One of my observations at CES was that although LG Display impressed with its rollable and 8K OLEDs, there were no big improvements in the main TV panels in terms of brightness. Better efficiency in the blue is one of the main barriers to more improvement, as far as I understand it.
We recently reported that Kyulux, which is also developing TADF, had also hit some problems (Kyulux in Trouble?). Solving the OLED material challenges has been a long and hard road. (BR)
