LONDON — The OLED lighting market will reach almost $4.5 billion by 2013 according to market research group NanoMarkets (Glen Allen, VA.).

The analysts claim that in the past year the prospects for the sector have made great leaps forward due to improvements in OLED performance and manufacturing.

They note that the unit costs of OLED lights are likely to remain higher than older general lighting technologies but the extra costs will be offset by improved OLED lifetimes and efficiencies. Over this year, lifetimes are said to have improved from 24 Khrs to 100 Khrs.

The NanoMarkets report notes that the U.S. Department of Energy now expects OLED lighting to reach 150 lm/W efficiency in 2012 rather than 2014 as previously forecast.

Manufacturing processes for OLEDs are also said to have progressed significantly. GE and the Fraunhofer Institute have both demonstrated roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing of OLED lighting which will ultimately lead to significant cost improvements in OLED fabrication.

Low cost printing approaches and new small molecule inks will also help propel OLEDs into the backlighting market.

NanoMarkets expects that the OLED backlighting market will reach $1.1 billion by 2015.

And while the first OLED lighting panels are quite small, the recent scaling up of factories in Asia to build large OLED displays will, the researchers suggest, benefit the manufacturing infrastructure for OLED lighting and lead to larger panels within a few years.

They note that the flat and flexible format presented by OLEDs creates an opportunity to design high-value added lighting fixtures with an appeal to upscale consumers and especially architects. As examples, they note that lighting designer Ingo Maurer introduced the world's first OLED "function table light" earlier this year, and that researchers at GE are targeting lighted curtains and lighted wallpaper.

By 2015, NanoMarkets projects that sales of OLED architectural and specialist industrial lighting will reach $1.9 billion. The report also notes that the emergence of OLEDs into solid state lighting systems provides an interesting diversification for OLED display firms that have been frustrated by the twists and turns of the OLED display market.

However, the market researchers caution that while it is easy to make a case for printed and OLED devices in the lighting market, as in many cases, "the devil is in the details."

For example, OLED lighting may be able to offer remarkable things such as flexible lamps, but no one yet knows where the demand lies for that capability and whether the perceived value will justify the additional cost.