OLED Encapsulation: introduction and market status - Page 17

Researchers from Dresden's University of Technology (TU Dresden) developed new highly efficient white top-emitting OLED design that feature "outstanding" color quality, and is compatible with flexible OLEDs. In this new design a refractive index matched microlens film was laminated to the top-emitting OLED to form direct optical contact. This enabled the researchers to achieve a CRI of 93, CIE coordinates of (0.472, 0.430) and an emission from 410 to 750 nm that almost spans the complete visible spectrum (380 to 780 nm). The efficiency is up to 30 lm/W (on par with the latest record white OLEDs from Novaled and OSRAM).

The lamination of such an outcoupling structure should be fully roll-to-roll compatible and even allows to be used as an encapsulation film when water and oxygen barriers are added.

Aneeve Nanotechnologies, a startup company at UCLA's on-campus technology incubator, managed to fabricate a new fully ink-jet printed carbon nanotube (CNT) circuit that is used to drive OLED displays. The company says that this is the first practical demonstration of carbon nanotubebased printed circuits for display backplane applications, and it shows significant performance advantages over traditional organic-based printed electronics.

Aneeve says that this shows that CNT is a viable technology to compete with a-Si and metal-oxide semiconductor for low-cost and scalable backplanes.

Jusung Engineering reports that they managed to developed a a new metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) technology to apply IGZO for use on flat panels. Jusung says they are the only company to develop an 8-Gen MOCVD IGZO tool, and that this technology will be compatible with future OLED display processes. We talked to Jusung and they say that they are already in talks with several potential clients (in Japan, China and Korea) and they hope to get purchase orders and start shipping equipment in the middle of 2012.

There are other methods (such as sputtering) for IGZO production. Sharp will soon start to produce IGZO displays in their upcoming production line, and over the past year we've seen IGZO OLED prototypes by Sony, Toshiba, AUO and other companies. Most (or all) of these prototypes have been developed using sputtering. Jusung claims that MOCVD will enable higher resolution than sputtering - indeed 4 or even 5 times higher! They also say that scaling sputtering to 8-Gen will be difficult, while their own MOCVD tool will be scalable up to these sizes easily.

Nippon Electric Glass developed a new glass that dramatically reduces glare - from around 8% light reflection in normal glass to only 0.5%. They call it the "invisible glass" - which obviously could be very useful in mobile devices and TVs. NEG used an anti-reflection film on each of the front and back sides of the glass substrate.

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.

Toray Industries is showing a Samsung-made 4.6" flexible OLED panel - which uses Toray's "component". We're not sure exactly what component Toray is talking about. We know that Toray is working towards Polyimide-based OLED encapsulation, but the company also develops blue OLED materials (at least the did back in 2008) - so perhaps Samsung are using their emitting materials? After all we know that Samsung are collaborating with Ube Kosan on Polimide development.

In any case, this OLED was showcased in Tokyo in a Toray's latest-technology exhibition. This OLED on show seems to be the same one unveiled back in November 2010 - a 4.6" WVGA panel (you can see this panel on video below).

MBraun released three nice videos showing their OLED processing equipment. The first one shows the UV-03 Cleaner - for the cleaning and activation of glass substrates or other optical surfaces using a simultaneous application of UV light and oxygen. This tool is used in both the coating and the encapsulation processes:

The second video shows the Vacuum Hotplate - used for both basic research and manufacturing. The combination of vacuum and heat transfer allows curing at modest conditions, addressing the sensitivity of organic materials to elevated temperatures:

The Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University (ASU) installed Sunic Systems' GEN-II OLED SUNICEL Plus 400 vacuum evaporation and encapsulation process tool. The FDC now has the ability to manufacture full color flexible OLEDs in-house - and the FDC says that they are already scaling the recently announced 3.8" AMOLED prototype (developed together with Universal Display, shown below) to larger sizes. The FDC purchased that system back in May 2010.

The FDC says that this new Gen II production system will enable the development of not only large-size flexible OLEDs but also solid-state lighting and plastic electronics.

We've got some interesting updates regarding Chimei Innolux (CMI) OLED program. As a reminder, CMI was born as a merger between Innolux, CMO and TPO. Both CMO (through its CMEL subsidiary) and TPO had active OLED programs, and CMEL were even producing panels up until the merger. CMI's own OLED plans are still unclear.

Back in February 2011 we reported that CMI indeed plans to start producing OLEDs in two plants - a Gen-3.5 (620x750mm) LTPS/OLED Plant in Jhunan, Taiwan and a Gen-5.5 (1,300x1,500) IGZO-TFT plant in Tainan (also in Taiwan). Later on there were reports that CMI actually scrapped all OLED plans for now. But in March the company unveiled a couple of new AMOLED prototypes (3.2" and 3.5", shown above).

Universal Display has quietly released a new PHOLED material performance chart. Their Green-Yellow material now has 1.4 million lifetime hours (LT50), and their Red color offers 900,000 hours. Blue is still very challenging, and their light blue offers only 20,000 hours (LT50). Here's the complete chart:

The company also released some PHOLED material efficiency. Using only red PHOLED (with green and blue fluorescent materials) will result in a display that is about 15% more efficient compared to an LCD (this is the combination Samsung used in their 4.5-Gen AMOLED fab). Adding green color will result in a a display that is 30% more efficient compared to an LCD (this is the combination Samsung is using in their new 5.5-Gen fab). Adding blue will give a 50% more efficient display. UDC says that further enhancements (not specified) can result in a display that is 67% more efficient than an LCD. All these results are based on a 4" display operating at 300 cd/m² showing a video that has 40% pixels on.