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

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.

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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.

Universal Display Corporation will today report advances in the development of P2OLED™, printable, phosphorescent OLED, material systems for use with ink-jet printing processes at the Society for Information Display’s (SID) 2008.

Presenting on a joint paper with Seiko Epson Corporation, Dr. Sean Xia, Senior Research Scientist at Universal Display, will describe advances in red, green and blue P2OLED material systems. Dr. Xia will also discuss the companies’ demonstration of ink-jet printed P2OLED technology and their continuing work to achieve commercial entry performance goals. Ink-jet printing has the potential to be a cost-effective approach for the production of large-area OLED displays.

The collaborative paper is the result of a joint development program during which the two companies successfully demonstrated the compatibility of Universal Display’s P2OLED technology and materials with Epson’s proprietary ink-jet printing process technology.

Through continued development using spin-coating techniques, the team has doubled the projected operating lifetime of its red P2OLED system since late last year to 100,000 hours (from an initial luminance of 500 cd/m2) with CIE coordinates of (0.67, 0.33) and a luminous efficiency of 12 candelas per Ampere (cd/A). The team also improved the projected lifetime of its green P2OLED system with CIE(0.33, 0.62) and a luminous efficiency of 34 cd/A to 63,000 hours (from an initial luminance of 1,000 cd/m2).

The team also made progress in the development of two blue P2OLED systems. A light blue P2OLED system with CIE(0.18, 0.39) and a luminous efficiency of 19 cd/A now has a projected lifetime of 6,000 hours from an initial luminance of 500 cd/m2, also twice that reported late last year. A new blue P2OLED system has more saturated color, with CIE(0.15, 0.22), a luminous efficiency of 6 cd/A and a projected lifetime of 1,000 hours (from an initial luminance of 500 cd/m2).

Universal Display’s PHOLED technology and materials, which offer up to four times higher energy efficiency than traditional OLED systems, are today being incorporated in products manufactured using conventional vacuum thermal evaporation (VTE) equipment. Universal Display’s P2OLED materials and technology are based on this same PHOLED technology, but are designed for use with solution-based manufacturing processes such as ink-jet printing.