DuPont Takes a Crack at Large-Scale OLEDs

DuPont and a Japanese manufacturer have been working together for the last three years to develop technology they now hope will open the door to cheaper, larger OLED screens.

Sony, Samsung and LG may be at the forefront of the race to develop viable consumer OLED televisions, but more companies are piling on, and the last entrants may come as a surprise. DuPont and Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Co., a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer, announced on Wednesday that they have teamed up to mass produce OLED screens with a new process they’ve pioneered together.

Both companies have been working over the last three years to refine a process for printing OLED using molecule-sized OLED solution from DuPont and nozzle printing technologies from Dainippon Screen. They hope the new manufacturing technique will allow them to build larger and cheaper OLED screens, to the point that they can actually compete with LCDs on price.

“We believe that this alliance could be the key for manufacturers to be able to produce affordable, high-quality larger sized OLEDs using our unique nozzle printer technology, ”said Yoshinari Yaoi, corporate senior executive officer and president of Dainippon Screen’s , FPD Equipment Company, in a statement.

Although the first production-scale printer is already being constructed, the companies did not sketch out a timeline for delivery of the first displays.