Asian manufacturing gets behind OLED lighting

Dan Rogers - 03 Jun 2010

OLED lighting has been the source of a flurry of announcements from developers in 2010. New demonstrators and agreements to develop products have come from Philips, Osram, Novaled and others.

Though the OLED displays market is dominated Asian companies like Sony in Japan and
Samsung and LG in South Korea, OLED lighting is spread more globally: Philips is headquartered in the Netherlands, Osram and Novaled in Germany and OLED lighting developers General Electric and Universal Display Corporation are based in the US.

However, Asian firms are certainly interested in OLED lighting markets. Specific applications have not been firmly established yet but there are moves to ramp up production of OLED lighting products in Asia, with both Japan and Korea at the forefront of efforts.

Scaling

Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (MCC) announced earlier in 2010 a development agreement with Pioneer, a Japanese manufacturer of home and in-car electronics. The announcement signals Mitsubishi's intent to sell OLED lighting for consumer electronics under its subsidiary brand, Verbatim. Pioneer will make OLED lighting panels and MCC will supply printable materials to create the Verbatim products.

While the volume of production planned is confidential, the fact that MCC has secured a user of its OLED technology is significant.

The company is interested in architectural opportunities - MCC exhibited at Light + Building 2010 - but such markets will be easier to penetrate with steady production volumes. And MCC is already forging ahead with scale-up.

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This article appears in full in Volume 3, issue 1 of +Plastic Electronics magazine, including comments from Hiroshi Tomiyasu, head of MCC's OLED business, and coverage of other key players in the OLED lighting market, from TechnoCorp Energy and LG to Novaled, Philips and Ledon.

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