Analysis shows OLED screens to drive booming market for plastic electronics

Screen technology will play a pivotal role in kick-starting a boom global demand for plastic electronics technology in the second half of this decade according to two separate reports from independent market researchers. OLED and AMOLED displays are the first products to reach consumers, and will drive improvements in production, that will then cross-fertilise other applications in areas such as security, medicine and photovoltaics.

OLED sales helping to ripen market
The first report Unmet needs in Plastic Electronics: Market and Technology Forecasts to 2018 from Smithers Apex, suggests that a lot of the necessary technical groundwork has already been done for an explosion in the plastic electronics market in years to come. Worth €6.2 billion in 2012, this is estimated to reach €47 billion in 2018. However with over 1,000 companies now involved in plastic electronics, commercial supply chains as they develop will be complex and have not yet stabilised.

OLEDs, and especially the market for touchscreens used in smartphones, will be standard bearers and remain the most profitable sectors in the short term. Large OLED displays offer great potential and the market will boom rapidly after a few years. Smithers identifies that production technology will have to be refined so as to produce OLEDs and other printed electronics at a competitive price, a flaw which hamstrung volume sales of the first large consumer OLED TVs in 2013. Once this is achieved, the technology will cascade down, cutting the price of OLEDs in new and existing applications and for other plastic electronic components too.

A substitute for indium
Smithers see another key barrier directly affecting two core predicted markets, solar panels and displays, as the need to develop alternative transparent electronic materials to substitute for indium tin oxide (ITO). A study released in November 2013 from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) listed the supply of indium to the EU as a 'medium to high risk' in the long term.

Several replacements for ITO using conductive inks are now approaching the market. German firm Henkel is marketing its new range of ECI 5000 inks towards this application, and AGFA is making its Si-P1000x nanosilver ink, which has already been demonstrated as an effective substitute for ITO in screen backplanes, available for sale in large volumes in 2014.

LTPS LCD to surpass AMOLED smartphone screens
The second report from NPD Display Research on flat panel displays [], confirms the pioneering role of smartphone displays as a medium for putting consumers in touch with AMOLED technology. AMOLED screens will account for 36% of the global revenue for these products in 2014. In the longer term however AMOLEDs will lose market share (down to 30% by the end of the decade) to low temperature polysilicon (LTPS) thin film transistor (TFT) LCD technology. Ultimately the latter will be the growth screen technology up to 2020, when it is predicted to account for 51% of the total worldwide smartphone screen market.

Significantly Samsung has chosen to fit Sharp's LTPS TFT LCD technology for the Galaxy Tab Pro, because current AMOLED production techniques will not be able to meet projected demand. The NPD authors note that the projected boom for LTPS TFT LCD is built upon a decade of research in evolving the manufacturing capacity and its low power consumption. It is now steadily displacing amphorous silicon, which is predicted to lose around a third of its 2013 market share in 2014. 

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