Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (Fraunhofer IPMS) - Page 9

The Fraunhofer Institute first announced their Tabola OLED lighting panels back in October 2010, with plans to release them in Q1 2011. We haven't heard anything since (and I assumed the project was scrapped) - but last week I got a nice surprise in the mail: three sample panels (two transparent, one structured). The Fraunhofer are now producing sample panels and have actually started to ship these cool transparent Tabola OLEDs to customers now - which makes these the first transparent OLED lighting panels on the market. Read on for our hands-on review.

The Fraunhofer IPMS is showing several new OLED lamp designs at the L+B 2012 show. The most interesting lamp is the OBranch one which uses new transparent OLED panels made at COMEDD. OBranch was designed by Irena Kilibarda (who also designed the OLED Lamped back in 2010):

And here's a pendant OLED luminaire:

Prof. Karl Leo from the Fraunhofer IPMS gives an talk about how to commercialize university technology. Karl Leo focuses on Organic Electronics and he already co-founded a few start-ups, including Novaled and Dresden microdisplay. The later part of the talk is devoted to OLED microdisplays - which Karl considers the most exciting thing he's ever done. Dresden Microdisplay is still looking for seed financing.

Karl also mentions a "killer lighting product" that needs financing, but he wouldn't disclose more info. During the talk, Karl says that OLED displays are already here - at least in smartphones. He believes that the next wave is OLED lighting, followed by organic solar cells and then finally organic electronics.

The Federal President of Germany Christian Wulff awarded the German Future Prize (Deutscher Zukunftspreis) 2011 to three organic electronics researchers: Prof. Karl Leo from Technical University of Dresden and Fraunhofer IPMS COMEDD, Dr. Jan Blochwitz-Nimoth from Novaled and Dr. Martin Pfeiffer from Heliatek. Both Heliatek and Novaled are spinoffs from TU Dresden.

The German Future Prize is worth 250,000 euro and is Germany's most prestigious award for science and innovation. Congratulations guys!

The Fraunhofer IPMS are developing a roll-to-roll process to make flexible large area OLED lighting panels. Next week they will show a 30cm wide flexible OLED lighting panel on a metal foil, fabricated at COMEDD. In fact they say that this demonstrates that they developed all necessary process steps for a complete production of flexible OLEDs in a roll-to-roll tool: from the structuring of substrate up to the lamination of barrier foils.

Germany's Fraunhofer institute has been touting their bi-directional OLED microdisplays for quite some time, and now they are showing a new version that doubles as a dimensional sensor. To create a bi-directional display, Fraunhofer placed photodiodes between the OLED pixels. These microdisplays can be used as dimensional sensorics for surface characterization (distance or inclination sensors).

"By inverse-confocal imaging approach a point-source sensor with purely electronic scanning allows extremely compact sensor modules", explains Constanze Grossmann from Fraunhofer IOF. "This opens completely new opportunities for machine integration."

Future now produced a nice video about The Fraunhofer IPMS OLED program. The video features sample lamps, OLED production and testing equipment, Tabola lighting panels and even a short visit to Novaled. Professor Karl Leo (the IPMS director) is interviewed throughout the video. It's a nice introduction to OLED lighting:

The Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) and Korea's Renetec will jointly build an OLED lighting fab in Gwangju, South Korea. The project will cost around 140 million Euro, and the Fraunhofer will apparently invest up to 25% of that sum (35 million Euro).

We don't have any more details at this time. Back in October 2010 the Fraunhofer IPMS Institute unveiled new OLED lighting panels called TABOLA (the full name is TABOLA OLED Light Tablets), set to be fabricated at COMEDD and released in Q1 2011 (which didn't happen yet). Perhaps these panels will be produced in the new plant - although it will probably take quite a while to finish the plant so they may develop newer and better panels by then.

The European OLED100.eu project developed a new OLED lighting panel that is the largest to date: a 33x33cm² panel. The new panel offer 25lm/W at 1000 cd/m² luminance. This relatively good efficiency was achieved using out-coupling and an efficient RGB OLED stack. The panels were fabricated at the Gen-2 line at the Fraunhofer IPMS.

The new panels are based on the on-substrate tiling concept - with 5 segments connected in series. The 33x33cm² panel itself is seamless and so can be tiled to create larger panels. The active area on each panel is 828cm^{2 (}aperture ratio of 76%).

Update: the video was removed from the web

Yesterday we posted about the Fraunhofer Institute's bi-directional OLED microdisplay, and today we found a nice video showing it in action (in German). And here's a nice photo of Dr. Uwe Vogel, a business unit manager at the Fraunhofer Institute, showing a demo of this interesting device: