OLED ink jet printing: introduction and market status - Page 28

Agfa, Philips and the Holst Center are showing a large-area (12x12cm2) flexible OLED - without ITO as transparent electrode, and with printed shunting lines. This means that costly materials and lithography processes are not needed, and the OLEDs are much cheaper.

Flexible OLED lighting prototype with no ITO

Up till now, ITO was needed as supporting layer for the PEDOT/PSS* anode layer with lower conductivity. Thanks to Agfa’s high-conductive transparent polymer OrgaconTM, a PEDOT/PSS-based solution with six orders better conductivity than its predecessor, the use of ITO can now be avoided. Proof is the latest OLED lighting demonstrator of Holst Centre’s shared programs: a homogeneous white OLED tile of 12x12cm2 without the use of ITO.

Panasonic is working on OLED lighting panels, using printing methods. They prototypes a high efficiency panel at Printable Electronics 2009.

The OLED lighting panel features a luminance efficiency of 40lm/W and a CRI (color rendering index) value of 95. The external quantum efficiency is 36.1%, and the half-life of the luminance exceeds 20,000 hours when the initial luminance is 1,000cd/m^2.

Read more at TechOn

Merck is a global pharmaceutical and chemical company based in Germany. The company designs, develops and manufactures a wide range of specialised materials including high performance light emitting materials for OLEDs. The OLED business belongs to Mercks' Liquid-Crystal (LC) unit.

I managed to conduct an interview with Dr. Udo Heider, the VP of the LC business unit at Merck (it's called the LC/OLED unit) about their OLED program.

Q: Hello Dr. Heider, and thank you for this interview. Can you describe your range of OLED products in more detail? Are you just into OLED materials, or other IPs as well?

Plextronics announced today that its conductive ink has been shown to improve the performance of certain PLED devices.

The research team at GE has put together a cool OLED christmas tree. The OLEDs were made by a roll-to-roll fabrication. The OLED is 6 inch wide, by 15 feet. Here's a nice video of the tree:

Anit Duggal, who's leading GE OLED program said - We’re making great progress toward hitting the metrics needed to successfully introduce OLED lighting to market. We continue to make steady advances in efficiency, lifetime, and lighting-quality using device structures that can be made with roll-to-roll manufacturing, so that we’ll be able to introduce OLED lighting at an affordable price.

We also got a nice high resolution picture of the tree:

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) will develop a new technology to make OLED backplanes, together with Semprius. The new tech will be integrated into CDT's 14-inch development line at Godmanchester campus, near Cambridge, UK.

Semprius has a technology for semiconductor printing, and the two companies will use the technology in the manufacturing of OLED backplanes.

Researchers working in the European ROLLED project have developed a flexible OLED element that can be mass produced using roll-to-roll printing technology. The OLED elements can be used to add value to product packages. The new method is considerably cheaper than the traditional manufacturing method. The project was coordinated by VTT,and project participants included INM, CSEM, Ciba, Hansaprint, UPM and PolylC.

ROLLED project flexible element prototype

The OLED element developed under the ROLLED project is made from organic materials and is encapsulated in a moisture barrier film. The element is 200-250 micrometers thick, the equivalent to three or four sheets of paper.

Alps Electric Co developed a P-OLED panel using printing technology. The panel uses a film substrate on which a getter, in addition to the emission layer and the electrodes, is formed by printing. The getter is used to absorb water, etc.

The emission colors are yellow and white. Both types have a luminance of 100cd/m2. The luminance half-life of the yellow emission type is longer than 1,000 hours and that of the white type is longer than 300 hours. The drive voltage of both types is 7-25V.

The latest polymer OLED panel was developed in collaboration with Add-Vision Inc, according to Alps.

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.

In June 2008, I had the chance of interviewing Dr. Geoff Williams, Topless's project manager. Geoff has a PhD from University of Durham, and later worked in Philips Displays and he now works in Thorn lighting.