This New Company Aims To Take OLED TV Tech To The Next Level

Did you know some colors are actually harder to produce than others in OLED displays? Blue, specifically, is perhaps the biggest problem child — at least when compared to red and green. We'll get to the "whys" in a bit, but the basic premise is that red and green use phosphorescent materials, which are far more energy-efficient. Meanwhile, blue relies on an older, less efficient method called fluorescence. Unfortunately, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and blue has basically been dragging the whole package for years. Fixing it has proven surprisingly difficult for the display industry. A solution does exist, and it even has a name — blue phosphorescent OLED, sometimes called blue PHOLED. The problem is that it usually has a short lifespan and is unstable. But if someone does get around the downsides and ships the tech in a production-ready form, OLED TVs could get brighter, cheaper, and longer-lasting all at once.

Now, a South Korean OLED material company called Lordin is apparently on the verge of doing just that. According to a report from The Elec, Lordin has locked down the manufacturing capabilities needed to mass-produce its own take on blue phosphorescent OLED. The company is calling its approach ZRIET, which stands for zero radius of intramolecular energy transfer. It's already sent evaluation kits to global OLED manufacturers for testing.

Lordin CEO Oh Young-hyun also told The Elec in an interview that the firm has secured a supply line for deuterium in India. That's a non-radioactive isotope of hydrogen and is used in nuclear reactors as a stabilizer. Turns out, they benefit OLED materials similarly, helping them last longer and stay more stable over time. India happens to be one of the world's top producers of it, thanks to the country's nuclear energy program.

Circling back to why blue is the difficult one in the RGB LED, well, it all comes down to energy. Blue has the shortest wavelength among the three primary colors of light, which means producing it requires the most energy. Red and green phosphorescent OLED panels can harvest energy from both singlet and triplet excited states, and those account for 25% and 75% of available energy, respectively. Put those together, and you get 100% luminous efficiency. On the other hand, fluorescent blue OLED can only tap into singlet energy. That caps its efficiency at around 25%. To make up for that, manufacturers have to stack three or four layers of blue fluorescent material, which drives up cost and complexity. This affects both types of OLED TVs on the market today – WOLED and QD-OLED – though each handles blue differently.

Lordin's ZRIET approach tries to sidestep this by combining the energy host and dopant into a single molecule. In traditional OLED emitters, energy has to travel from one molecule to another, and the farther that distance, the more efficiency you lose along the way. Meanwhile, Lordin's ZRIET approach basically collapses the travel distance to near zero, which means way less energy gets wasted in the process.

With these tricks, Lordin says its blue emitters can hit over 20% external quantum efficiency and roughly 60% longer lifespan compared to fluorescent blue. Expect better color accuracy on a finished panel, too, since the company claims the emitters reach a wavelength of 456 nanometers with a narrow spectral width.

The current market leader in OLED materials is Universal Display Corporation, a U.S. company that holds key patents for red and green dopants used by Samsung Display and LG Display. But even UDC hasn't commercialized a phosphorescent blue emitter yet. Lordin's CEO has stressed that his company's technology uses a fundamentally different structure, which could matter a lot if and when this market finally opens up.

Helping Lordin achieve its goals is a $25 million funding round, which the company is in the middle of. It wants to close it by the end of 2026, with plans to go public in South Korea the following year. That said, Lordin isn't the only one chasing this. LG Display announced last year that it had reached the commercialization stage for blue PHOLED on smaller screens like tablets and smartphones, and that was a first for the industry. Ultimately, if and when this market opens up, there's going to be real demand for alternatives that don't depend on any single supplier. And with LG Display, Lordin, and others all pushing forward, that future might not be as far off as it once seemed.