Roll-to-roll - Page 4

The €11-million 3-years European Flex-o-Fab project was launched in January 2013 with an aim to help commercialize flexible OLEDs. The researchers working on this project have now successfully fabricated a flexible OLED prototype in a roll-to-roll (R2R) process.

The OLED prototype (shown above) was produced on a PET plastic film, and the researchers say this is a significant breakthrough on the way to commercial production. It uses technologies developed as part of the Flex-o-Fab project in addition to the Holst Centre's own high-performance flexible barriers for organic electronics.

An LG Display researcher revealed that the company is developing a roll-to-roll process to produce flexible OLED displays. LG says this will enable them to make very flexible displays and reduce production costs.

LG Display also seeks to replace the aluminum electrodes with copper ones. This will again decrease costs and will also enable higher-resolution displays. There are some concerns with copper electrodes over environmental hazards but LGD apparently resolved those issues.

Deposition equipment maker SolMateS developed a patented 'soft-landing' method ITO deposition, specially tailored for OLED panels. The soft-landing technique is based on SolMateS's pulsed laser deposition (PLD) process, and it enables a fully-functional ITO layer directly on the organic materials, at room temperature.

The company reports that they managed to deposit an ITO on a transparent OLED that features a transparency of 80% with similar functional specifications compared to standard OLEDs (with non-transparent Aluminum electrode).

In October 2013, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) launched a new flexible OLED lighting project called R2D2. This two-year 5.9 million Euro project, which was finally exposed now, aims to investigate new production technologies, including roll-to-roll techniques. One of the main subjects of investigation will be the system integration of flexible OLEDs in automobiles, aircraft and household applications.

The project is based on results from previous BMBF projects - R2Flex, So-Light and TOPAS2012. The consortium leader is Fraunhofer FEP, and other partners include OSRAM, Novaled, Audi, Hella, and others.

In March 2014 Konica Minolta announced that it is starting to construct a R2R flexible OLED lighting fab with plans to start production in the fall of 2014. The company now updates that the equipment is now running, and first panel samples are being produced. KM still aims to start shipping commercial products in the fall.

Konica invested ¥10 billion (almost $100 million) in the new fab, which will have a monthly capacity of a million panels. This will represent a breakthrough in OLED lighting capacity.

Pixelligent Technologies entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) with an aim to optimize the formulation for ORNL’s roll-to-roll process for OLED lighting devices.

Pixelligent says that this agreement will allow them to further optimize materials and formulations to demonstrate improved performance and cost for OLED lighting roll-to-roll processes. This project also gives Pixelligent access to the state-of-the-art facilities and world class expertise at ORNL.

Fraunhofer COMEDD is looking to advance flexible OLED lighting device lifetime, and towards that goal the German institute developed flexible OLED lighting panels on flexible glass substrates. COMEDD reports that flexible glass can enable curved panels that has high OLED lifetime - much higher than can be obtained with polymer-based encapsulation and substrate technologies.

Fraunhofer developed those new panels on their own Roll-to-Roll R&D line in collaboration with Von Ardenne (on the development of process equipment) and Nippon Electric Glass (they provided the "G-Leaf" flexible glass rolls). The G-Leaf glass is less than 35 um thick and can be used in roll-to-roll processes.

Konica Minolta announced that it is starting to construct an OLED lighting fab at Konica Minolta Kofu Site (Chuo-shi, Yamanashi Prefecture). This fab will mass produce flexible OLED lighting panels (on plastic substrates). The construction will end in the summer of 2014 and mass production will commence in the fall of 2014.

Konica Minolta says that it reached the conclusion that light, bendable and durable OLED lighting panels on plastic substrates will "deliver new values to customers not only in general lighting and architecture sectors but also in electric appliances and automobile sector". Konica will invest ¥10 billion (almost $100 million) in the new fab.

The EU announced a new SSL lighting project called LASSIE (Large Area Solid State Intelligent Efficient luminaries) that aims to develop hybrid inorganic and organic lighting technologies. The aim is to develop a device with the efficacy and long life of high-power LEDs and the color-tunable diffuse lighting of OLED panels.

It's not clear, but it seems that the project will use the LEDs for the actual light output and fluorescent-based soluble OLED materials for tuning the color. According to CSEM (one of the project partners, the OLED material swill be deposited using a roll to roll process.

The UK's' Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) produced a range of flexible OLED lighting demonstrators. These prototypes were manufactured at CPI's OLED/OPV prototyping line. The CPI made several panels on a range of substrates with thickness ranging from 50µm to 125µm.

Those devices are made from an ITO anode, evaporated hole injection layer, co-evaporated emissive layer and a conventional cathode. The OLEDs are encapsulated using a pressure sensitive adhesive and a commercially available barrier material. The CPI's researchers are investigating a number of methods for device encapsulation and are collaborating with adhesive, getter, and barrier film suppliers.