OLED lighting introduction and market status - Page 6

The Fraunhofer FEP Institute published this nice video that shows its latest technology innovations, including its OLED (regular and bi-directional) microdisplays, its new AR/VR optics, flexible OLED lighting panels, its Monarch flexible and transparent OLED panels, sensor and coating technologies and more.

The Fraunhofer FEP also created and published a new virtual tour of its facilities, where you can have a look inside the labs and flexible organic electronics R&D clearnroom.

Design house Look Labs announced the world's first perfume bottle with embedded OLED lighting. The Cyber EDP is a unisex fragrance, produced in France.

The perfume bottle included an embedded touch sensor and battery (both produced by a printing process). The OLED is red in color, and Look Labs says the battery will be enough for around 500 cycles.

Researchers from the University of Michigan, in collaboration with Universal Display are developing a low-cost roll-to-roll (R2R) process to produce flexible OLED lighting panels. The goal is to achieve a panel cost of less than $10 per klm - a tenfold reduction compared to current costs.

The roll-to-coll system can continuously produce encapsulation panels, at high speeds and reduce costs. The front plane (organic stack) deposition is done via OVPD. The researchers say the will demonstrate reliable, encapsulated 25 cm² flexible white OLED panels with an efficacy of 50 lm/W and a CRI >85 on barrier-coated plastic films or thin glass.

Last month we reported that Konica Minolta started to offer its flexible OLED lighting panels to global customers. One of the panels that KM is producing is a small red panel that can be integrated with an NFC antenna. This is an interesting concept, that is demonstrated in the video below.

The low power consumption of the OLED panel enables it to be powered by the NFC receiver and operate without a battery. It will be interesting to see what kind of applications will be developed using this technology.

UK-based PolyPhotonix, has been researching OLED technologies for many years, and its first commercial product will be the Noctura OLED sleep mask which helps patients with Diabetic Retinopathy.

The company announced today that it has signed a deal with Pioneer for the supply of OLED panels for the sleep masks.

In March 2014 Konica Minolta announced that it is starting to construct a R2R flexible OLED lighting fab, hoping to start production in the fall of 2014. This fab entered production later than planned, and took a long time to reach real mass production capabilities. KM has been producing panels for quite some time, but finally it is offering its panels to global customers.

Konica Minolta is currently offering four different modules - two white panels, sized 43x15 mm and 15x15 mm and a red 15x15 mm panel. The red panel can be integrated with an NFC Antenna. The panels can be flexed (40mm radius) and they all offer a brightness of 500 nits.

The OLED Association reports that Kaneka is seeing a market for OLED lighting panels in manufacturing sites, for visual inspection. The company is currently marketing such solutions in Japan, and the company says that OLED lighting can help detect defects on surface of parts, and it helps to lessen the burden on inspector eyes.

Kaneka says that it has seen defects reduced by 50% by using an OLED system instead of an LED system - at a brightness that is only 10% compared to the brightness of the LED system. It is seeing success in this market and the company's Q2 2020 panel output volume (at its OLED Aomori subsidiary) was up 10X compared to Q2 2019. The company is producing 3.54x3.54 inch OLEDs for this market.

China-based OLED lighting developer Yeolight Technology announced that its OLED panels were adopted by Hongqi in its latest H9 flagship sedan which is now being launched in the Chinese market. Hongqi is owned by FAW Car company and is actually the oldest Chinese passenger car brand.

The H9 uses 4 red OLED panels in each module. The panels are 131x32 mm in size and have 5 segments each. The color coordinate is CIY(0.69, 0.31).

At SID Displayweek 2020, BOE demonstrated an OLED automotive taillight module, developed in collaboration with "automotive makers" which BOE did not detail.

The red OLED taillights from BOE offer up to 2,000 nits in brightness and a lifetime of over 20,000 hours. The panels are less than 0.3 mm thick and will operate in a wide temperature range (-40 to 95 Celsius).

This is a sponsored post by Lumtec

Lumtec, a leading OLED materials manufacturer, announced newly developed Hole Insertion layer (HIL), Electron Transport Layer (ETL) and Electron Insertion Layer (EIL) OLED materials. Lumtec says that its patented new materials offer high efficiency and can be used in both OLED displays and lighting panels.

Lumtec has been developing OLED materials for over 20 years, and aims to provide cost-competitive and high performance pure OLED materials. The company also helps its customers with custom synthesis of OLED materials.