OLEDs vs. LEDs in lighting applications

13th August 2012

IDTechEx Ltd

ES Admin

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The OLED lighting industry is still in its infancy. The price points are several orders of magnitude above those projected by industry roadmaps and even more off cost targets that are required for widespread market uptake. There is still no set of standards or consensus in the industry on optimal device architecture (stack, double layer, etc), manufacturing technique (evaporation, solution processing or hybrid) or manufacturing toolkit. It is not even clear how OLED lighting can borrow from techniques developed and scaled for the OLED display industry.

With cost drivers today such as integrated substrates (encompassing the substrate, the transparent conductor and external light extraction layer), which constitute 45-50% of the overall cost and encapsulation issues, it is not yet clear how and when costs are going to come down to competitive levels when compared to LEDs.

LED technology on the other hand is many years ahead of its OLED counterpart. It was already a $10billion market in 2011. In 2001, there were only 38 manufacturing sites globally; this rose to 169 in 2012. Today, manufacturing takes place mostly in far Asia. Indeed, China, Japan and Taiwan offer 52.2% of the global manufacturing capacity.

Not all however is well with the LED industry. Similar to the photovoltaic industry, the market today is currently experiencing a supply glut (China has heavily subsidised manufacturing capacity). The industry itself has created excess capacity in anticipation of market pull from the LED-LCD industry and in addition to this, the demand is also expected to slow.

Going forward, the most difficult challenge lies in meeting the tough cost targets set by the incumbent technology. The enormity of the challenge can be appreciated when one thinks that LEDs, with all their complexity, will need to be cost competitive with an incandescent lamp that is essentially a simple resistor.