Universal Display Corporation says that it has hit a bump in the road as it progresses with the development of its extremely promising “phosphorescent blue technology”, otherwise known as PHOLED, which is expected to deliver a big boost in brightness for OLED displays.
PHOLED is one of the most promising up-and-coming technologies in the display industry. The Phosphor OLED material is said to be more efficient than existing materials that make up the blue pixels in OLED TVs, enabling higher brightness with less power, meaning the display runs cooler. Phosphor tech is already used in the production of red and green OLED pixels, but it has been much more challenging to implement in blue.
The technology is especially promising for Samsung Display, given than its QD-OLED displays are mostly made up of blue pixels, utilizing a quantum dot layer placed over them to change the colours. LG Display is also said to be extremely interested in the technology.
Given their interest, both companies will likely be disappointed to learn that UDC believes it will take a little longer than first forecast to get PHOLED technology ready for prime time. The good news, though, is that the delay is expected to be a matter of months rather than years. As such, UDC remains confident that its blue PHOLED material will become commercially available in 2025, only at the end of that year rather than the beginning.
We should never take manufacturers’ words for it when they tout impressive figures about the performance of their new products, but in theory, blue PHOLED-based displays should be able to deliver 100% more internal luminous efficiency than their fluorescent counterparts, which are widely used in OLED displays today. That means display makers should be able to achieve much higher overall brightness, without elevating the energy use of their products.
While red and green PHOLED materials are fairly simple to make, blue is much more challenging due to the intricate nature of stabilizing the chemistry involved. Until 2022, UDC hadn’t been able to make blue PHOLED at all, until it finally announced a “technological breakthrough” that followed more than 20 years of effort. With that announcement, there was a lot of excitement, with display makers hopeful that they could introduce the new tech into their products within just two years.
That prediction turned out to be a tad too optimistic, but the industry remains hopeful that blue PHOLED’s introduction is just a matter of time. UDC, which announced the delay during its second-quarter earnings call, didn’t say what has caused the latest setback, but there are indications that it may have been aware of it for some time already without saying anything publicly. For instance, The Elec – a South Korean industry publication – reported in late 2023 that Samsung Display had pushed back its plans to introduce blue PHOLED to late 2025, several months later than first planned. At the time, UBI Research analysts said that blue PHOLEDs were still handicapped by a “low lifetime” amounting to about half that of the traditional fluorescent blue OLED pixels.
This week’s news just seems to confirm that report, but overall, there is still good reason to think that the future of OLED remains bright, it’s just that it may take a little longer before we see it.
