OLED temporarily unable to shake the LED lighting market

IDTechEx, a marketing and consulting firm, recently studied market opportunities for OLED lighting. Because of its strong competition with the traditional LED. The study found that OLED and LED competition is very difficult. Nevertheless, the OLED market will grow rapidly in the next few years.

OLED seems to be struggling to define and spread its unique selling point, and compared with LED lighting, there is a problem of high prices, poor performance, IDTechEx expert Norman Bardsley and Khasa Ghaffarzadeh concluded. Unless Apple's innovative design. In other words, in the standard application, OLED can not compete with LED, but in the field of design features as the dominant factor in the field, OLED great opportunity. This could happen in hotels, retail stores and building lighting.

At the moment, the effect of light drag the hind legs of OLED. The traditional package level LED light efficiency is usually 90-100lm/W, while the OLED module is only 20-50lm/W. Short life is another weakness of OLED. The working life of LED is much longer than OLED. In fact, the working time of the LED lamp is 50000 hours. In contrast, OLED lighting package after the working life of 5000 - 15000 hours.

Cost is another key factor. LED package price is $5/klm, and the overall price of the lamp is $20 to $100klm. And OLED is far more expensive than this. In fact, the price of $300 to $500/klm (panel level), including lamp design costs, OLED is not a cost-effective choice. Although OLED vendors typically place their products in the professional market, which is still expensive, the OLED price problem is still due to the technical level. The packaging layer (barrier, adhesion and seal) and integrated substrate (transparent conductive layer, substrate and light emitting layer) is still the main driving force of cost.

OLED lighting has a high potential in large area lighting, but also has the advantage of size, although most of the current OLED lighting applications on hard glass. Nevertheless, OLED lighting is still in the early stages of development.

LED lighting projects are more mature and more money is being used in the LED rather than OLED. Recently, however, many companies have begun to be active in the field of OLED lighting, investment is also increasing. For this reason, experts predict that the price reduction of active materials will be very rapid.

The growth of the OLED screen will help the OLED lighting market, the former will bring more cheap, higher performance equipment over time the supply chain will overlap. The challenge of OLED lighting applications can not be solved solely by panel manufacturers alone.

LED lighting is essentially a point light source, and OLED lighting is a flat light-emitting device, although OLED lighting seems to be competitive in this area, but not so obvious. This is because the connection of multiple LED and optical waveguide (wave guide) can be used to achieve efficient planar luminescence. At the same time, most of the OLED production is currently using the two generation substrate.

Size (mechanical flexibility) is usually the main selling point. The reason behind the current OLED technology is that the packaging layer (encapsulation laye) is based on glass - but the future of OLED display in the flexible barrier material (barrier) progress will help to improve the situation. OLED also has the advantages of color temperature, low width and thickness.

IDTechEx predicts that OLED will grow to $1 billion 300 million in 2013, and will grow at an annual rate of 40-50%, although the market is still small.