Universal Display Developing ‘Next-Level’ OVJP ‘Research Tool’ for Large OLED TVs

OLED technology supplier Universal Display continues to make progress developing a “research tool” aimed at commercializing organic vapor jet printing (OVJP) production processes, said CEO Steve Abramson on a Thursday earnings call. OVJP has the “potential to revolutionize the manufacturing of large-area OLED TV panels,” Abramson said on Universal’s previous earnings call in August (see 1708040030). “In the lab here, we have designed and are in the process of building the next-level tool, which should be in end of this year or beginning of next year,” and the company “will start working off of that,” toward commercializing OVJP, he said Thursday. “We are continuing to explore alternatives on how we may want to best commercialize this technology. We believe that OVJP has a lot of advantages in making large area OLED televisions. So we are very excited about this opportunity.” But it’s “very difficult at this stage to predict the timing” of when OVJP might come to market, said Abramson. “This is a whole project,” he said in Q&A. “We are looking at a few years because you continually need to scale up to the next generation. So we are improving in the basic research functions and now we are working on the development and scale-up functions.” As with “any new tool that you have invented, you have to work through the kinks,” he said.