In an advance that could hasten the day when energy-efficient glowing plastic sheets replace traditional lightbulbs, a method for printing microscopic lenses nearly doubles the amount of photons coming out of the materials, called organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs.

Stephen Forrest, an electrical engineer and vice president of research at the University of Michigan, says his technology increases the light output of the thin, flexible OLEDs by 70 percent. "They just create local curvature that allows light to pass through," he explains.

Solid-state lighting, using either organic or inorganic based light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is revolutionising the way we generate light for everything from back-lighting on your mobile phone to traffic signals and home-lighting.

The challenge in this area is to make organic LEDs (OLEDs) that can compete with existing light sources in efficiency, stability, colour quality and operation lifetime. Ching-Fong Shu of the National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, and colleagues have now created a white light OLED that fulfils several of these prerequisites. They combined a blue-emitting polymer with a green-emitting polymer and a red emitter to produce their promising device.

In the Next Generation Computing Show 2006 in Korea, ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) showcased a flexible OLED prototype.

Just two months after announcing a significant improvement in blue polymer lifetimes, Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) and Sumation announced another lifetime milestone for blue light emitting polymers.

Data from devices produced using these latest, solution processable, fluorescent materials show lifetime of 25,000 hours from an initial luminance of 400cd/m², equivalent to 400,000 hours from 100cd/m².

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Next-Generation OLED and Paper-Like Displays: A Technology and Market Roadmap to their offering.

This new report examines the market opportunities stemming from the latest generation of OLED and paper-like solutions in a variety of applications including advertising and shelf-edge displays, billboards, flat-screen televisions, desktop and notebook computers, book and newspaper readers, mobile phones, PDAs, MP3 players and disposable electronics. It covers a variety of critical new display technologies including small molecule OLEDs, polymer OLEDs, electrophoretics, cholesteric liquid crystal, electrochromics and toner-based displays. The report provides detailed eight-year forecasts for these new display technologies, broken out by application, technology, substrate type, etc. The report analyzes the market from all perspectives including materials suppliers, technology providers and consumer electronics firms.

The report is targeted towards materials suppliers, equipment manufacturers, components and module suppliers, display firms, companies producing mobile electronics products and anyone else interested in this emerging market opportunity.

TMA is a technology which potentially can be incorporated into driver chips to bring active matrix capabilities to passive matrix displays. TMA reduces power consumption and enhances panel lifetime for a given pixel count in passive matrix displays. Measurements on small passive matrix displays that incorporated the TMA solution, demonstrated at least a 50% reduction in power consumption or exhibited double the display luminescence at the same power consumption.

he TMA driving system applies both to polymer and small molecule OLED displays. CDT is currently considering how to bring the technology to market in the shortest possible time. A working demonstrator has been created using individual electronic components, that exploit the new driver and image processing technologies. This will be developed further in the coming months. CDT is in discussion with OLED display producers and IC driver companies with a view to commencing design work for commercialising TMA as soon as possible.

The OLED industry has achieved shipments of more than 20 million units based on cells in the third quarter of 2006, which is a record high exceeding the previous record of 18 million units in the fourth quarter of 2005, according to DisplayBank.

The OLED market registered 12 million units in the first quarter, 18 million units in the second quarter, and 21 million units in the third quarter of this year, and this figure is projected to rise further to 22 million units by the fourth quarter of 2006, adding up to approximately 73 million units for the year 2006.

Samsung has a new AMOLED demo site with a well done flash presentation. It's in Korean, but still worth a visit - it's beautifully done.

Unfortunately, the site is no longer up.

OSD announces the release of its latest character PLED module, the OSD1601-D. This new 1 line by 16 character PLED module has an overall mechanical dimension of 122mm x 33mm x 8.9mm. Its high contrast characters are 4.51mm x 8.6mm contributing to a display active area of 84.31mm x 8.6mm. 

When compared to negative mode LCD modules the OSD1601-D offers significant power savings. Typical current consumption with 25% pixel utilization, a full screen of characters, at 40 nits is

The PLED module offers a wide operating temperature range. Since the PLED material is a solid state light emitter it s response time is unaffected by changes in ambient temperature. Response time (40us rise and fall) and contrast (>100:1), unlike LCD, are the same at -20C as they are at +70C. Storage temperature ranges from -30C to +80C.

The interface is fully HD44780 compatible, allowing the OSD1601-D to be easily integrated into existing LCD designs. Please contact OSD for price.

Ron Mertens from OLED-Info.com recently had the opportunity to interview Susan Jones, eMagin's Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer.

eMagin is engaged in the design, development, manufacturing and marketing of virtual imaging products that utilize OLEDs, OLED-on-silicon micro displays and information technology solutions. Focused on Micro displays, eMagin is selling its micro displays to companies that incorporate them into products such as cameras, army helmets or headsets, etc.

Q: First of all, thank you for accepting to do this interview session with us... Let's begin. What kind of OLED microdisplays are you currently selling?

eMagin is currently selling SVGA+ OLED and OLED-XL microdisplays that have 852x600 color triad pixels, SVGA 3D OLED and OLED-XL microdisplays that have 800x600 color triad pixels. We also just announced the availability of a limited number of interface design and reference kits with prototypes of our new SVGA 3DS OLED-XL microdisplay that is the same resolution as the SVGA-3D, but with a much smaller diagonal.