General Electric (GE) - Page 3

GE has reportedly stopped working on Incandescent light bulbs. They actually had plans to make efficient and clean Incandescent bulbs, and even had working prototypes, but they scrapped those plans because governments are starting to ban those kind of light sources.

GE will instead focus on LEDs and OLEDs. GE has stated before that it hopes to have OLED light products by 2010.

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.

GE hopes to start making several-feet-wide OLEDs soon. Their goal is start selling such products in 2010, but they know it's a very aggresive target, and they might not make it.

Since the production runs will be small by then, the prices won't be
accessible to the average consumer. But the luminous OLEDs could show
up in niche, luxury settings, like casinos or fancy restaurants, where
the thin and flexible lights could allow the creation of striking
architectural or artistic effects.

GE released a nice presentation video, and it's all about OLEDs, and how they may be used in the future for lighting. Not many technical details, it focuses more on possible applications, which are rather nice:

The last we heard from GE about OLED lighting was in March 2008 , when they Demonstrated the World's First ''Roll-to-Roll'' Manufactured OLEDs.

In April 2008, we had the chance of interviewing Mary Kilitziraki, Fast2Light's project manager. Fast2Light is an integrated (9 companies, 3 research institutes and 2 universities) R&D project that aims to research and develop light emitting foils based on OLED tech.

Q: What are the major goals of the Fast2Light project? What will you consider to be a big success in the project?

Fast2Light aims to lay the foundations for marrying large-area roll-to-roll technologies with the field of organic electroluminescence, for all necessary layers in an OLED device on foil. We aim to set in place all the experimental platforms that when integrated will produce a high quality lighting foil. Yet, these technology platforms can be used in other electronic devices. We will indeed think ourselves as successful if we develop and master the new large-area processes and demonstrate these in a 30cmx30cm lighting foil in 3 years time. But equally important, one of the successes of the project will be the exploitation of our results, on platform level, in other fields of electronic devices.

GE Global Research today announced the successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured OLED lighting devices. This demonstration is a key step toward making OLEDs and other high performance organic electronics products at dramatically lower costs than what is possible today.

Researchers have long dreamed of making OLEDs using a newspaper-printing like roll-to-roll process, said Anil Duggal, manager of GE’s Advanced Technology Program in Organic Electronics. Now we’ve shown that it is possible. Commercial applications in lighting require low manufacturing costs, and this demonstration is a major milestone on our way to developing low cost OLED lighting devices.

Duggal continued, Beyond OLEDs, this technology also could have broader impact in the manufacturing of other organic electronic devices such as organic photovoltaics for solar energy conversion, sensors and roll-up displays.

For businesses, architects, lighting designers and anyone interested in pushing the envelope to achieve increasingly energy-efficient lighting — and vastly expanded lighting design capabilities — today marks the day that viable, commercialized OLED lighting solutions are coming into view, said Michael Petras, GE Consumer & Industrial’s Vice President of Electrical Distribution and Lighting. We have more work to do before we can give customers access to GE-quality OLED solutions, but it’s now easier to envision OLEDs becoming another high-efficiency GE offering, like LEDs, fluorescent or halogen.

The demonstration of a low-cost, roll-to-roll process for OLED lighting represents the successful completion of a four-year, $13 million research collaboration among GE Global Research, Energy Conversion Devices and the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The goal of the collaboration was to demonstrate a cost-effective system for the mass production of organic electronics products such as flexible electronic paper displays, portable TV screens the size of posters, solar powered cells and high-efficiency lighting devices.

ECD Senior Vice President Nancy Bacon said, This program was a major step in developing high volume roll-to-roll manufacturing for OLEDs and other organic semiconductor devices. The success of this program is testimony to the effectiveness of NIST’s advanced technology program model, and our 20-year history of pioneering research in roll-to-roll technology. We currently are utilizing this technology to mass produce our flexible, durable and lightweight UNI-SOLAR brand solar laminates. ECD looks forward to continuing collaboration with GE to further develop this technology for future commercialization.

GE researchers provided the organic electronics technology and were responsible for developing the roll-to-roll processes, while ECD provided its unique roll-to-roll equipment-building expertise to build the machine that manufactures the OLED devices. The machine is being utilized for further manufacturing research at GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York.

The development of this low cost roll-to-roll manufacturing process has the potential to eliminate the manufacturing hurdles that currently exist in preventing a more widespread adoption of high performance organic electronics technologies such as OLED lighting. The unique commercial equipment and technology needed to enable high performance-based organic electronics products does not currently exist. The few organic electronics products on the market today are made with more conventional batch processes and are relatively high cost. A roll-to-roll manufacturing infrastructure that enables high performance and low cost devices will allow a more widespread adoption of organic electronics products.

The US Department of Energy (DoE) has selected eight solid-state lighting (SSL) research and product development projects that will receive total funding of $13.3 million.

GE has just posted some interesting information about their OLED product research (just after the recent GE and Konica Minolta partnership announcement).

The have successfully made a 2" x 2" OLED white light source (build out of several small OLED panels).

Konica Minolta has tied up with GE to jointly develop flexible and thin lighting products using organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology. Konica Minolta said it would aim to release a product within three years, most likely using the GE brand.

Company spokeswoman Yuko Ogiso said Konica and GE would develop devices that are thin and can be bent to fit curved surfaces, aiming to offer a new category of lighting while cultivating the business into a new driver of earnings growth. Ogiso said the company did not have any concrete profit or sales forecasts for the OLED business.

Ron Mertens from OLED-Info.com recently had the opportunity to interview Toshiki Mizoe, overseas sales manager, Tokki Corporation. Tokki manufactures vacuum process equipment and factory automation system, and developed the first OLED mass production system in 1999, which processed both OLED / electrode material deposition and encapsulation by one system. Tokki's OLED production system has been delivered to most of small molecular OLED manufactures in Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

Q: First of all, thank you for agreeing to conduct this interview. Can you describe your production system (ELVESS)?
ELVESS is cluster tool OLED production system, and it has evaporation chambers for organic materials and metal (for cathode), and automatic encapsulation unit is connected to the system. Total system can be run for 5 to 6 days without stop, with tact time of