Novaled - Page 10

After receiving investments totaling billions of dollars over the past decade, the OLED industry is finally poised to take off. According to NanoMarkets, an industry analyst firm based here, the markets for OLED materials will reach $2.7 billion by 2015.

Vitex and Novaled are going to combine advantages of the Vitex Barix
thin film technology with the Novaled doping technology and
materials targeting very thin and high efficiency long lifetime OLED
products.

In July 2008, I had the chance of interviewing Gildas Sorin, Novaled's CEO. Novaled is engaged in the commercialization of the new generation of OLEDs. Novaled developed an innovative doping technology (Novaled PIN OLED) enabling large area OLED display and lighting.

Novaled claims to deliver the highest power efficiencies in combination with longest lifetimes and holds several OLED world records.

Novaled, established 5 years ago, is located in Dresden, Germany. Dresden city is becoming the biggest European organic electronic centre with a network of university, R&D centers and companies acting in the organic fields.

The companies behind the OLLA project (Philips, OSRAM, Siemens, Novaled and Franhofer IPMS) agreed to fund another OLED lighting project - the OLED100.eu, a follow-up project.

The new project will start on September 2008, for 3 years. The budget is $30 million, $20 million out of which will come from the EU.

At the end of the project period, the OLLA project consortium presents its final milestone: the basic technology for a white OLED light source, with an efficacy of 50.7 lumens per watt at an initial brightness of 1.000 cd/m² based on the Novaled PIN OLED technology. The OLLA project is a joint basic research consortium, headed by Philips Lighting.

The OLED technology is generating a novel and very attractive class of solid-state light sources, which are flat, thin, and very lightweight. Due to its freedom of design, OLED lighting technology offers many possibilities for new lighting applications achieving substantial energy savings. Within OLLA 24 partners of 8 European countries have been working closely together developing OLED technology for lighting purposes with the goal to reach an efficacy of 50 lumens per watt combined with a lifetime of over 10.000 hours at 1.000 cd/m2 initial brightness.

Philips Research and Novaled, together with the partners reached the project targets in efficacy, color rendering and brightness. The lifetime of the Novaled device even exceeded the promised value by one order of magnitude.

The Novaled PIN technology has the potential to further improve the power efficiency. It’s in line with the technology roadmap that in the near future some 100 lm/W OLEDs will be achievable, adds Dr. Martin Vehse from Novaled.

Collecting all light of the device in a laboratory set-up with a macro extractor, we measure even more than 80 lumens per Watt, comments Dr. Volker van Elsbergen,
Philips Research, the achievement. "This shows that one of the keys to higher efficiencies will be better light outcoupling technologies. \

Besides the record values listed above, the OLLA project delivered the first large sized ITO-free OLEDs, the first large-area printed OLEDs and several ICT demonstrators. All demonstrators were on show last Thursday on a public event in Eindhoven.

Philips, Osram Opto Semiconductors, Siemens, Novaled and Fraunhofer IPMS will continue the development of OLED lighting technology in a follow-up project. Within this new OLED100.eu project, the efficiency, lifetime and size of OLEDs will further increased.

The final symposium of the OLLA OLED lighting project took place on the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven Netherlands 12.6.08 with about 80 attending the exhibition and about 60 attending the half day conference. The objective is to start the work that will lead to replacement of many of the "6 billion lights that the world buys every year". Presentations from OLLA, Siemens, Novaled, Fraunhofer IPMS, Philips Lighting OLED Development and Royal Philips Electronics and the exhibition alongside revealed that the objectives had been met or exceeded. These objectives embraced laboratory demonstration of sharply improved life for 1000 cd/m2 emission and larger panel size etc, compared to what was available when the project was conceived five years ago.

Polymer OLEDs, despite being printable, were bypassed early on to concentrate on glass sandwiches of small molecule OLEDs. Here, phosphorescent layers exhibited poor life so the long life Novaled PIN OLED construction was favored. All this had echoes of Philips earlier abandoning P-OLEDs on the same campus.

CDT, Sumitomo and Novaled plan to co-develop hybrid OLED devices combining both new polymer emitting layers and doped electron transport layers. It is expected that these hybrid devices will offer further improvements in power efficiency without additional manufacturing complexity. The parties have reached an agreement on how IP generated during the JDA will be handled. Further, Novaled will grant a license to CDT enabling CDT to add necessary Novaled device IP to its existing and future licenses. Each company will remain responsible to market its own materials resulting from this co-development.

CDT continues to focus its effort on supporting the PLED supply chain and is pleased to be involved in yet another joint development project which has the potential of bringing new materials and improved device performance to our licensees, says David Fyfe, CEO of CDT.

There's a new OLED group that has just been formed - the OLED Association (OLED-A). The group is managed by Barry Young (Former senior VP, Display Search).

There are ten members in the group - Cambridge Display/Sumitomo, Corning, DuPont, Kodak, eMagin, Ignis, MicroEmissive Displays, Novaled, OLED-T, Samsung SDI, and Universal Display, and OLED-A are working to add more members.

Techon has posted an interesting discussion with Novaled's CEO.

Highlights:

• Our goal is to improve the luminance efficiency to 100lm/W, which, I believe, can be achieved in 2 years.


• The key feature of OLED lighting equipment is the superior energy efficiency due to the high luminance efficiency


• OLED is the direct evolution of LCD panels, not a revolution against them

Summary:

• Red phosphorescent emitter functions optimally with Novaled’s proprietary technology for highly power-efficient OLEDs


• Delivers lifetime of 50,000 hours at initial brightness of 1,000 cd/sqm


• Supports market trend toward high-performance, low-voltage OLED devices

Ciba has developed a deep red phosphorescent OLED emitter that functions optimally in combination with the Novaled PIN OLED™ technology, delivering a lifetime of 50,000 hours at an initial brightness of 1,000 cd/sqm. The new material supports the market trend toward high-performance, low-voltage OLED devices for display and lighting applications.

We want to provide the market with efficient phosphorescent materials, says Rolf Drewes, Global Head of Business Line Electronic Materials at Ciba. In this project, we are developing the full color range of emitters compatible with Novaled’s proprietary OLED technology. Our deep red, the first to become commercially available, offers customers not only long-lifetime performance but also excellent thermal stability. Green and blue are now in progress.

Phosphorescent emitter materials together with low-voltage devices are mandatory for the future of the OLED industry, and Novaled is very pleased to see a key industry player developing such materials, adds Gildas Sorin, CEO of Novaled AG. This deep red phosphorescent material provides a long lifetime at a lowest operating voltage of 3.3 V as well as good power efficiency of 8.1 lm/W, making it suitable for displays as well as for completely new lighting applications. OLED technology even has potential to surpass the efficiency of energy-saving bulbs.

Made of thin organic material layers only a few nanometers thick, OLEDs are semiconductors that emit light in a diffuse way to form an area light source. In 2006, Ciba and Novaled entered an industrial collaboration to create organic dopant and transport materials for the Novaled PIN OLED™ technology, which enables highly power-efficient OLED performance.