Yole Développement (Yole), based in Lyon, France, has released a report on organic TFT developments and said that the next 18 months would be critical for the industry. The firm said that multiple panel makers are currently attempting to unroll OTFT into older fabs. If successful, this would boost the credibility of the technology and the willingness of panel makers to invest and scale up. On the other hand, failure in the current attempts could be a fatal blow for the industry or at least, push back adoption by another five years. Indeed panel makers would temporarily pull the plug on their industrialisation effort and send OTFT back to the lab until all the technology bricks are ready for true flexibility or other, non-display applications emerge.
In order to enable this market, OSC/OTFT makers business model and marketing efforts have evolved from focusing on the commercialisation of OSC molecules to offering full material packages and complete, fab-ready technology and process toolboxes. Full toolkits are now available that include all essential materials and processes to enable OTFT manufacturing with existing equipment
“We estimate that the global demand for TFT display panels across all technologies will reach 188 million of m² in 2016 and increase to 238 million of m² by 2022”, said Dr Eric Virey, Senior Technology & Market Analyst at Yole. Indeed the market demand is strongly dominated by large displays such as television and computer monitors. Smartphones come third despite their smaller area thanks to very high volumes. “Together, those 3 segments represent more than 90% of the total”, comments Dr Eric Virey.
Yole sees different opportunities for OTFT in the medium and long term. Click for higher resolution
