Nanosys CEO Sees 2019 as Big ‘Development’ Year for Hybrid QD-OLED TVs
LAS VEGAS -- Though large-screen hybrid quantum-dot OLED TVs aren't nearly “ready for market,” Jason Hartlove, CEO of QD materials supplier Nanosys, expects the technology will make “pretty significant development progress this year” as prelude to a commercial product launch in 2020 or 2021, he told us at CES. A QD-OLED hybrid TV combining QD’s superior color rendering with OLED’s unmatched contrast performance is one of several technologies Samsung is developing for the future premium large-screen TV segment, said the Tier 1 TV maker last summer (see 1807310002).
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“Photoemissive” QD materials for future QD-OLED displays “are ready to go,” said Hartlove. “They’re patternable to the sizes required,” and they “meet all the customers’ specifications as far as integration” in the supply chain, “which is really a critical thing,” he said. “It’s the first time that we’ve actually been able to get quantum dots into what I would call a semiconductor-grade material.”
With existing and emerging QD implementations such as QD enhancement films and QD on glass, “we mix them in with polymers and there’s a lot of other goop in there” with the QD particles themselves to render them “pretty immune environments to stray contaminants,” as is required in a display, said Hartlove. “Once you start putting QD materials into high volume, actual lithography tools in the semiconductor process to make panels” for QD-OLED TVs, “the purity’s got to go up, all the contaminants have to go down,” all without the help of those extraneous “chemicals, he said.
Nanosys has “worked through” those challenges “with all of our customers, and basically the materials are in a very good position,” said Hartlove. The “remaining challenge” for QD-OLED TV products to come to market now resides “in the hands of the panel maker and the TV set maker,” he said. “Those guys are still working on how to get the cost-effective OLED source materials put together.”
The development “plan right now” is to use a multilayer blue OLED substrate as a “driver” for QD-OLED TVs to promote maximum brightness and “at the same time” protect and “maintain” the life expectancy of the display, said Hartlove. “That’s a little tricky, because now you’ve got maybe two layers, or maybe even three layers, of emissive OLED material, and you want to make sure that they’re all performing the same. That’s where I see a lot of the process development happening.”
Hartlove views 8K -- a big story at CES (see 1901080038) -- as a “trick, really at the end of the day, that the panel makers are able to do, so they’re bringing it to market,” he said. “It’s not a consumer-driven or a pull-driven kind of thing.” Panel makers “like those kinds of technologies” if it’s “something they can do within their existing line, and not do a lot of heavy lifting,” he said.
HDR, by comparison, is “a heavy lift” for panel makers, said Hartlove, citing the "huge" data rates typically running to a display's "backplane," especially those with "thousands" of LEDs in a backlight with "thousands" of local dimming zones. "When we see the final workup versions of these things, you wouldn't believe it," he said. "There's thousands of ribbon cables going to these backlights."
Though Nanosys long has viewed QD applications in a TV as resolution-agnostic, 8K is "pushing us, for sure" to innovate further in the QD space, said Hartlove. “We’re working on new QD materials, very exciting stuff, that are cadmium-free but have very, very good blue-light absorption,” to promote the "overall efficiency” in a display, he said. “Those materials are going to be ideally suited, I think, for 8K, which is really needing every single photon it can get." Hartlove said of the panel makers: "These guys are coming back and saying, blue-light absorption's really critical, so there continues to be a roadmap of innovation in our materials, which we're really excited about."