OLED vs LED Lighting

LED Market
It has taken twenty years for LED lighting to reach 8% of the $80 billion global lighting market, appearing in everything from car headlights to home lighting to street lighting. However, compared to the previous years, the foremost rapid growth has slowed down and every possible niche market is fairly populated.

What is the impact on OLED lighting? Will those in OLED lighting achieve efficiencies, yields and lifetimes fast enough before LED becomes ingrained? Printing is already being applied to LED lighting for connectors and even printing LEDs themselves. Others are mounting LEDs on flexible substrates. But will the thermal problems restrict the applicability of LED lighting on flexible substrates, paving the way for OLED lighting there? Who is investing in OLED lighting manufacturing?

OLED Market
Just as it is the case with the LED market the majority of the OLED market is still driven by displays. Compared to that, the OLED lighting market is very much in its infancy, with rather expensive OLED luminares and lamps commercially available as samples or used in design installation, but no mass production is in place, yet. Nevertheless, OLED lighting attracted a lot of interest and investment in the last couple of years and virtually all lighting companies are involved in OLED research and development. If OLED lighting is to suceed in penetrating only a small portion of the global lighting market, revenues could be in the millions. In fact, IDTechEx forecasts a $200-300M annual opportunity for OLED lighting in the next 2-3 years.

What comes next?
The next big topic for OLED lighting R&D is the development of flexible panels resulting in first products by 2015. This is driven by and will benefit from the flexibility trend for OLED displays, which will drive the development of better and cheaper flexible barriers, a key bottleneck for the technology, in the next couple of years.

Key Challenges
Other key challenges ahead are investment for larger area device manufacturing to lower the panel cost, reduction of material costs (esp. for glass, edge barriers etc), improved yield, the availability of low cost, and differentiated product design and marketing from LED lighting.

Printed Electronics USA 2012
At the forthcoming Printed Electronics USA 2012 event the topic will be discussed in great detail by the following presenters:

Dr Srinivas Sista, Materials Scientist at GE Global Research will talk about OLEDs for Lighting Applications, with focus on improving the performance (Efficiency, Lifetime and Cost) of solution processed OLEDs through device design. GE Global Research is one of the world's most diversified industrial research labs, providing innovative technology for all of GE's businesses. GE Research has been the cornerstone of GE technology for more than 100 years, developing breakthrough innovations in areas such as medical imaging, energy generation technology, jet engines and lighting.

The applicability of Printed Electronics Technologies to OLED lighting will be discussed by Mr Takeo Arai of Konica Minolta, Japan; this includes Konica Minolta's activity in OLED lighting, their world's first all-phosphorescent OLED product, a technical approach to R2R process for OLED lighting, and high-barrier films for printed electronics or flexible OLED. Konica Minolta, a leading company in EP (Electrophotographic Printing) sector, now has industrial inkjet technology as well.

A market forecast for the OLED lighting sector compared to state-of-the-art LED lighting will be given by Dr Norman Bardsley, Consultant on Displays and Organic Electronics at Bardsley Consulting. He will compare large area OLED lighting agains large areas diffuse lighting as well as capital, material and performance of LED vs vacuum processed OLED lighting vs solution processed OLED lighting, and conclude with a LED and OLED lighting forecasts 2013-2023.

Mr Mike Lu, Director OLED Technology at Acuity Brands Lighting, will give an overview of OPLED Luminaire products and application designs.

Related topics discussed at Printed Electronics USA 2012 are Flexible & Bistable Displays, New Progess with Barrier Film, The Future of Transparent Conductors and more.