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OLED Manufacturing and Material Supply
AppliFlex will provide fabrication tools, consumables, processes and know-how for the OLED market. The OLED industry is growing rapidly; revenues are expected to increase twelve-fold to almost $6 billion by 2010 (source: DisplaySearch). The most widespread OLED manufacturing processes are based on thermal evaporation of small organic molecules and spin-coating and ink-jet printing of polymers. However, the current OLED market is held back by significant barriers:

Dramatically reducing the waste of the deposited organic material to less than 50%,
Using less expensive light-emitting, conductive and encapsulating polymers,
Making use of the enormous range of properties provided by polymer chemistry, and
Using scalable low-temperature contaminant-free vacuum deposition techniques.

The materials represent 40% of the cost of an OLED and are very expensive,
Vapor-phase deposition and spin-coating waste more than 80% of these materials,
Current production techniques are not scalable to large panel display sizes, and
The OLED devices have lifetimes that are at least a factor of 10 too short for TVs.

Material	LVD	Thermal Evaporation	Ink-Jet/Spin-Coating
Alq3	Yes	Yes	No
MEH-PPV	Yes	No	Yes
PEDOT	Yes	No	Yes
Polyaniline	Yes	No	Yes
Teflon	Yes	No	No