Organic Electronics Materials: New Revenues and New Challenges
NanoMarkets has just published a new report - “Organic Harvest: Opportunities in Organic Electronic Materials” and according to our latest numbers this currently “nichey” little business will exceed $1.0 billion in sales for the first time by 2010 and then go on to reach $15.8 billion by 2015.
In doing so it is going to take some interesting new paths. Today, organic electronics materials are all about OLEDs. We think that some 80 percent of materials sold for OE at the present time are for this application. But that is going to change. Coming up fast are OTFT applications in RFID and display backplanes. During 2007, we saw the first tentative steps to the commercialization of both applications. Although the case for neither application has been made fully, OTFTs do seem to be an attractive route to both ultra-low cost RFID tags and flexible backplanes.
By 2012, we expect that organic electronics materials sales into the RFID sector will actually exceed sales of materials into the currently all-important OLED market. Sales into the display backplane sector probably never will exceed OLED materials sales, but we still have great expectations for them. At the moment, display backplanes using organic materials account for under $1 million mostly made up of some pentacene and some plastic substrates. We think, however, by 2015 we will be talking $1.8 billion of materials sold into the organic backplane sector, if the semiconductors, conductors, dielectrics and substrates are all added up.
Not that the OLED market is going to become unimportant for materials makers. This year, 2007, hasn’t been the best of years for the OLED industry. OLEDs have not moved into cell phone main display sector as fast as some people hoped and retooling by display firms in Asia made the second half of 2007 a very poor one for OLED production.
On the other hand, 2007 wasn’t the worst of years for OLEDs either. As we forecast in 2006, we are seeing the beginnings of a new revolution in television in the form of OLED televisions. These are beautiful slim things with vibrant colors that do real justice to HDTV feeds in a way that the LCD displays that came before them could never do.
The good news for the materials firms is that one of these big OLED displays is going to use a lot more OLED materials than hundreds those tiny little OLED displays that are currently used in MP3 players and cell phone sub-displays.
But not for a while. New television technologies always take a few years to work their way from simply creating awe in the showrooms of Circuit City and Best Buy to being installed in living rooms. In the meantime, OLED materials firms should be able to find substantial business in the lighting sector, where - as we said in our lighting report of a few months back - OLEDs have a lot to offer in terms of lifetimes, brightness, etc. (Plus the fact that OLED’s mature cousins, HB-LEDs, cannot compete with OLEDs when it comes to serving the function of floodlights.)
The bottom line is that - one way or another - the OLED materials market should reach $4.4 billion by 2015, if substrates are included.
But there are going to have to be some pretty big changes at the supply end of things. Today’s organic semiconductor materials are for inadequate for the opportunity ahead. Besides their limits on performance, many of them are only available in small quantities. When it comes down to it a lot of organic electronics these days involves just a few kinds organic materials; pentacene, PEDOT, P3AT, P3HT and so on.
In fact, many of the conducting and dielectric materials used in organic electronics are actually inorganic. Silver is a widely used conductor, of course. Silicon dioxide is frequently used as a dielectric. Silver is hard to beat, being nature’s best electrical conductor with a conducting oxide to boot. But silicon dioxide isn’t the world’s greatest dielectric. It can be a bit leaky in thin films, for example. Our connections in the organic electronics world tell us that the search is on for new, better (and perhaps) organic dielectrics.
And this budding industry is not resting on its laurels when it comes to improved semiconductors either. There is a lot more on this is our new report, but a material to watch is certainly rubrene which promises single crystal organic transistors with radically improved performance. We also expect a lot to come from new formulations which combine organic materials with carbon nanotubes. These hybrids will offer the printability, wide area capabilities and suitability for flexible substrates of organic materials with the high performance of carbon nanotube electronics; this a much more practical use for carbon nanotubes in electronics that the pure carbon nanotube electronics that was being promised a few years back. As a result carbon nanotube electronics firms, such as Nantero, are now looking to organic electronics for first markets.
Another new direction for organic electronics will be some kind of organic equivalent of CMOS. A lot of firms are dabbling in this now and it is a pretty tricky goal to achieve given the scarcity of commercial n-type organic semiconductors. BASF was one firm that was touting such a material at the OEC’07 show a few months back and we suspect that a lot more firms will be heading in that direction. CMOS is what has made the semiconductor industry what it is today. Could it do the same for organic electronics?
While we are waiting for what’s next in organic materials, the organic electronics industry will gradually go through the same chicken and egg process that all new industries go through when dealing with materials suppliers. At first such industries need materials in such small quantities that they are all but laughed at by suppliers and have to make do with materials that are really meant for other applications. Until very recently the photovoltaics industry had to buy the crystalline silicon that the semiconductor industry left over. But now PV has grown and materials firms make silicon to meet the PV industry’s special needs.
Something similar can be expected from organic electronics. For example, by 2015 the market for substrates for organic electronics will have reached $6.9 billion, which is a big enough market to attract the interest of any ambitious plastics or paper maker. (Plastics and paper, because by then, almost 80 percent of sales will be for flexible substrates.) But by then also, to win business, substrate makers will have to meet the special needs of the organic electronics industry, which means substrates that have specially prepared for organic electronics using novel forms of barrier coatings and special attention given to reducing surface roughness.
By 2015 materials makers will also have to supply organic electronics materials that are designed for an industry that will be shipping devices in quantities. This will of course mean that these suppliers will also have to ship in quantity. And they will also have to adjust their offerings to work better with in large-scale manufacturing plants. These plants now seem more likely to use versions of traditional evaporation, coating and flexo printing, rather than the much touted ink-jet approaches. It has been interesting to see how as firms have ramped up production during 2007, they have tended to lean on the more traditional processes. For example, Plastic Logic has recently bought some Aixtron thin-film deposition to create the dielectric layer in its backplane, while still touting themselves as the having “developed the first process for printing electronic circuits on plastic substrates to be ramped-up to an industrial scale.”
