UDC to Commercialize Blue Phosphorescent OLED Devices with Higher Efficiency and Reasonable Prices by 2024

UDC, an organic light emitting diode (OLED) material company in the United States, has announced that the price of blue phosphorescent OLEDs will be reasonable considering their efficiency. The company plans to begin mass production of blue phosphorescent devices in 2024, which was announced in February of last year. By changing the existing fluorescent method to a phosphorescent method for blue OLED devices, the internal luminous efficiency can be increased four-fold.

According to UDC Vice President Mike Hack, the plan to commercialize blue phosphorescent OLED devices in 2024 remains unchanged. Last year, the company achieved the initial target specifications for blue phosphorescent OLED devices. Currently, in the three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue), red and green OLEDs use phosphorescent components with an internal luminous efficiency of 100%, while blue OLEDs only use fluorescent components with an internal luminous efficiency of 25%. Mass production of blue phosphorescent components following red and green OLEDs can increase the overall efficiency of OLEDs.

Hack predicts that the development of blue phosphorescent devices will not affect the demand for the "Two Stack Tandem" structure. The two-stack tandem structure refers to the technique of making the luminous layer into two layers in red (R), green (G), blue (B) OLEDs, which is currently applied more in small and medium-sized OLEDs. This RGB method uses a fine metal mask (FMM) to deposit RGB sub-pixels near the same luminous layer, which is different from the technology used in large OLEDs (W-OLED QD-OLED) that only use an open metal mask (OMM).

In RGB OLEDs, the double-stack serial structure has already been applied to LG Display's mass-produced automotive OLEDs, and it is also being applied to Apple's planned iPad OLEDs to be released next year. OLEDs are developed by Samsung Display and LG Display.

UDC will only produce dopants (luminous materials) and hosts (luminous layers) for blue phosphorescent devices, and not prime (auxiliary layers). Currently, UDC exclusively produces dopants, which are critical for red and green OLEDs.

QD-OLED is likely to be the first application of blue OLED phosphorescent components that Samsung Display is developing internally. Industry experts believe that the technology to remove the QD color conversion layer glass substrate top plate in existing QD-OLED and the development of blue phosphorescent OLED will affect Samsung Display's additional investment in QD-OLED. The material cost of existing QD-OLED is 1.5 times that of W-OLED, so cost is an important consideration for additional investment.

On the other hand, OLED luminescence methods are mainly divided into phosphorescence and fluorescence methods. The phosphorescence method uses 25% of the luminescent (excited state→ground state) energy of the "singlet exciton" and the remaining 75% of the "triplet exciton" to maximize the internal luminous efficiency to 100%. In contrast, the fluorescence method only uses singlet excitons, and the internal luminous efficiency is only 25%. OLED products on the market generally use red-green phosphorescent elements and blue fluorescent elements simultaneously.