Fraunhofer IAP - Page 13

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.

The pilot fabrication system consists of clusters combining thermal evaporation and organic vapor phase deposition (OVPD) modules. The usable substrate size is 370 x 470 mm² on glass substrates and foils. The targeted tact time is three minutes, resulting in an annual capacity of approximately 13,000 m². The system is designed for efficient materials usage and flexibility in substrate format and organic stack. It is one of the worlds first pilot production systems for OLED lighting and organic based solar cells.

The order of the fabrication system is the first step to establish COMEDD at the Fraunhofer IPMS. To speed up the time to market for OLED lighting, organic solar cells and OLED-on-CMOS-devices, the Fraunhofer IPMS is building three pilot production lines. Germany’s state and federal government, as well the EU, are investing € 25 million into COMEDD to establish the leading European institution for R&D and pilot production of small-molecule organic devices.

The order of our tool is for us an important step to OLED lighting fabrication machine market. says Dr. Hoon Lim, CEO of Sunic Systems.

The integration of an OVPD® module is a milestone for our business to integrate next generation fabrication technology into new market segments. notes Dr. Bernd Schulte, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at AIXTRON AG.

Read more here (Azom)

MicroEmissive Displays plc is about to start commissioning and qualification of its plant for making small, low-power displays using organic light emitting polymers in the Fraunhofer IPMS in Dresden, Germany.

The company also announced it had received £2 million worth of orders from an un-named consumer electronics maker in the Far East, the first for products to come out of the Dresden fab, which will make MED's second generation of its microdisplays. These 6mm color p-OLED QVGA displays, which will be capable of 10,000 hours of use at 80cd/m2, can be combined with magnifying optics to make a large virtual image.

Researchers using an in-line vertical OLED manufacturing process aim to set milestones in terms of cost-effectiveness and efficiency.

A cheaper technique for mass-producing OLED displays and lighting tiles might be a step closer thanks to research being carried out at Fraunhofer IPMS in Germany. The unique vertical in-line tool operates with continuous vertical substrate flow and linear sources for depositing organic and metallic materials. The production line at IPMS is designed for a substrate height of 400 mm and width of 470 mm or larger.

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Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research (IAP) in Potsdam have succeeded in constructing transparent OLED displays using light-emitting polymers. Their brightness, operating life time and efficiency are so high that the first commercial applications can be envisaged. We achieved this result by using a new type of metal electrode to supply the polymer film with electric current, reports Armin Wedel of the IAP.

The clue of the transparency lies in its physical properties. Earlier metal oxide coatings were too thick to allow enough light to pass through. But making them thinner reduces their conductivity and hence the luminescence and operating life time of the display.

Fraunhofer IPMS offers customer/application-specific developments based on highly efficient OLEDs in combination with the novel fabrication technology based on the world-wide first vertical In-line fabrication system for organic light emitting diodes.

Especially for OLED light sources the cost pressure on the fabrication is enormous. The Fraunhofer IPMS will show on the fair the first time a novel fabrication combination to achieve low cost fabrication for lighting applications. One important aspect for fabrication cost is the used ground contact, which is commonly build by the use of ITO, a widely used contact material for LCD displays. Due to grow of display fabrication the cost for ITO increases drastically over the past 3 years by a factor of three. For low cost fabrication a low cost alternative for ITO have to be used. The Fraunhofer IPMS makes investigations, inside of the European largest OLED lighting project named OLLA (High brightness OLEDs for ICT & Next Generation Lighting Applications), to replace ITO by a new low cost material named ZAO (Aluminium doped ZnO) . Large area highly efficient OLEDs on this low cost anode material will be shown on the fair.

Read more here