Nippon Electric Glass is showing the world's slimmest OLED Lighting panel - only 100 micrometer thick, using their ultra-slim glass substrate. They say that the panel has a high-level gas barrier properties, and that it can be easily bent.
Researchers from China, Singapore and the US has created new inorganic-LED based displays, that are brighter and more versatile than OLEDs, and can also be made flexible and transparent.
The team first created what they call a "sacrificial layer" in the manufacturing process. It's a weak adhesive that holds the LEDs in place while they form, but then it's partially dissolved away by an etching liquid. Next, a rubber stamping device presses down on and grabs hold of a bunch of the crystals. The stamping device picks up the LEDs and deposits them onto flexible sheets of glass, plastic, or rubber, where they are integrated with the conductors and insulators that will allow the lighting array to function. The result is a thin, flexible array that's much brighter than conventional OLED arrays.
Rogers says the material for the inorganic LED arrays, square centimeter by square centimeter, is still more expensive than its organic LED counterparts. But because the inorganic diodes are so much brighter, far fewer are needed to create a display of equivalent brightness--and therefore the cost of the inorganic LED arrays is comparable.
Corning and the Soitec group have agreed to work on the development of high-performance silicon-on-glass (SiOG) substrates for OLED displays for mobiles.
Corning's silicon-on-glass technology, currently in development, is a thin, single-crystal silicon film applied to Corning display glass. This development is expected to produce an engineered substrate with outstanding electrical mobility and material uniformity, upon which electronic circuits can be easily applied by display manufacturers.
Soitec's proprietary Smart Cut⢠technology is used to transfer ultra-thin single crystal layers of wafer substrate material (such as silicon) onto another surface. This technique is used to fabricate more than 90 percent of SOI production wafers in the semiconductor industry.
Corning is showing their latest Silicon-On-Glass (SiOG) technology. SiOG is used to transfer a thin-film of silicon into a display substrate. SiOG is scalable, and currently Corning can make it on a Gen2 substrate, Gen4 by the end of the year.
Corning SiOG prototypeThe SiOG process would permit the fabrication of stable OLED pixel switches with higher yield and much greater performance than LTPS, and on larger substrates. Corning claims that costs will be lower, because this enables manufacturers to integrate the circuitry on the display substrate easily.
Some panel makers are already trying this out, and hopefully we'll see prototype OLED displays based on SiOG by the end of 2009.
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.
Vitex has produced a nice video of several OLED products that use their thin film encapsulation technology. Among those products you can see the Samsung's flapping display, foldable phone and curved displays. Several UDC OLED prototypes are in there as well, including their flexible displays, developed together by LGDisplay.
Vitex told us that their tech is used on AMOLED and PMOLED displays, on glass, silicon or metal foil. Some of those products use direct encapsulation, and some use barrier substrate. A few of the photos seen show products that use flexible CIGS PV cells laminated with Vitex's barrier.
The new Center for Organic Materials and Electronic Devices Dresden (COMEDD) facility is now open in Dresden, Germany. COMEDD is owned and operated by the Fraunhofer IPMS and it will be used to make OLED displays and lighting products, and also OPV panels.
Fraunhofer hopes that COMEDD will become a production center for OLEDs and not just a research center with pilot lines. The researchers at COMEDD will focus on OLED displays on glass, Microdisplays on silicon (in partnership with MED) and flexible displays on plastic. They will also make OLED lighting on glass or flexible substrates.
PolyPhotonix, a UK based OLED-lighting startup is building its first production line. They want to make 3M efficient OLED panels with high yields. They say their main markets are automotive and architectual lighting. In fact they got their first funding through a project called MENDIP, in which Sanko Gosei (a Japanese car interior maker) is another partner.
The production line will make the OLEDs on 200x200m glass substrates, at least initially. Later perhaps they will use flexible plastic substrates.
Demonstrating an OLED TV just 0.3mm thick at the D: All Things Digital event, Stringer said: it’s a glass, we can produce this in plastic and you can wrap it around your arm, we’re not quite sure why you would want to. We’re looking for applications for the next generation of the plastic version but this will come out in a 27-inch version fairly soon. Within the next 12 months, we haven’t given a date.
Researchers at Purdue University have created the first active matrix display that uses a new class of transparent transistors and circuits. The researchers say this is a first step towards flexible color monitors and heads-up displays in car windshields.
The transistors used in the display are made of nanowires, which are tiny cylindrical structures assembled on thin glass or plastic films. The nanowires used by the researchers for the display are as small as 20 nanometers or about a thousand times thinner than the average human hair. The nanowires were used to create an OLED display that rivals current flat-panel TVs in brightness.
