Lordin to commercialize blue OLED lighting

Organic light emitting diode (OLED) startup Lordin will launch OLED lighting products, the company said on Tuesday.

Company CEO Oh Hyoung-yun said it will develop a blue OLED material and launch lighting products that will have a different concept from what is in the market.

Lordin specializes in blue OLED __ the most difficult of the three colors blue, red and green as it has a shorter wavelength that causes it to die faster than the other colors.

The company also offers OLED material patent analysis services for OLED material companies. It allows them to workaround patents and support material development.

According to Lordin, around 500 to 700 OLED materials related patents are unveiled a month with around hundred of them expiring on the same month. Analyzing these patents allows OLED material companies to know which companies has the most competent materials, what business network they have and what patents are expiring, Oh said.

The company can offer such services to Chinese companies and co-develop materials with them, the CEO said. It was collaborating with one Chinese client for around a year now, Oh said.

Lordin has secured the rights to 38 patents related to electron and hole transport layer in OLED, it said. It was also developing blue OLED material technology of its own.  

The company is aiming to develop a wall-paper like OLED lighting product. This differs from LED lighting that needs to hang on the ceiling.

Blue OLED has short lifespans and needs to be stacked in three to four layers. Technology development around blue focuses on increasing its lifespan and reducing the layers to make to save costs in production. Lordin was considering a roll-to-roll method of production.

CEO Oh has been working on OLED technology for 25 years. He worked at LG Electronics and LG Display for 13 years __ from 1997 to 2011. He was a researcher of blue OLED system at LG Display. He worked at SFC, a joint venture between Hodogaya Chemical and Samsung Display, as director of blue host and dopant development. He was the CTO at Material Science.

Lordin was founded in February this year and is based in Dongtan, Hwaseong City in South Korea. It has 8 employees with 5 of them being researchers with over ten years experience in OLED. The company was in the middle of a US$2 million Series A funding round.