Power consumption - Page 16

A couple of months ago US-based OLEDWorks announced that its Philips acquisition is finalized, and the company now introduces new OLED panels and modules.

So first up we have an update to Philips' OLED Brite FL300 panels. The Brite 2 FL300 are more efficient than the original FL300 (more than 60 lm/W for the 3,000K panel - up from 50 lm/W), a higher CRI (over 90, R9>50). The new panels are also available in two colors: 3,000K and 4,000K. You can find the preliminary product sheet here.

In 2012 the EU launched the TREASORES project (Transparent Electrodes for Large Area Large Scale Production of Organic Optoelectronic Devices) that aimed to develop technologies that will lower the production costs of organic electronic devices.

The Fraunhofer FEP now reports that the project concluded successfully and one of the results was the development of several new transparent electrode and barrier materials. The project partners developed electrodes based on carbon nanotubes, metal fibres or thin silver - and these electrodes (some of which are already mass produced) enabled the creation of the OLED lighting device you can see above.

Taiwan's PMOLED maker WiseChip Semiconductors licensed National Tsing-Hua University's blue-light free OLED lighting technology, with an aim to mass produce panels. Supported by the Taiwanese government, Wisechip aims to start mass producing those 1900K OLEDs within two years.

Today we have some more information on this interesting project. National Tsing Hua updates that they have now developed (together with Wisechip) a 2nd-gen lighting panel that features an efficiency of 70 lm/W and is 5x15 cm in size. The University has been awarded two OLED lighting awards (a Taiwanese golden-award and the IDA Lighting Design Award).

In January 2013, Merck said that the performance gap between soluble and evaporable OLED emitters is closed - at least in the lab. Earlier this month at the OLED World Summit the company revealed the development results of their phosphorescent materials, comparing them to UDC's materials (as published on UDC's website).

Merck's red emitter features an efficiency of 19.1cd/A, a lifetime (L90) of 5,900 hours and the CIE is (0.66, 0.34). UDC's red material features an efficiency of 29 cd/A and a lifetime of 23,000 hours. Merck's green material features an of 76.4cd/A, a lifetime of 5,200 hours, and the CIE is (0.32, 0.63). UDCs green features an efficiency of 85 cd/A and lifetime of 18,000 hours, The CIE is similar (0.31, 0.63).

A few days ago Samsung launched their latest phones, the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S6 edge+. Both use a similar 5.7" QHD (2560x1440, 518 PPI) Super AMOLED displays (the S6 Edge+ uses a plastic-OLED curved over the edges). Display measurement experts DisplayMate posted an in-depth review of the display used in these new phones (they tested pre-release production units).

Unsurprisingly, DisplayMate found that these are the best mobile displays they ever tested - there are many significant improvements over both the Galaxy Note 4 (which was previously crowned as the best mobile display) and the Galaxy S6. The most impressive improvements are in peak brightness, screen readability in high ambient light and the power efficiency.

US-based Pixelligent has been researching light extraction materials for OLED lighting panels for a long time, and the company now officially announced a new family of OLED lighting products.

The PixClear Zirconia nanocrystal family of high index materials enable revolutionary light extraction and efficiency for a wide variety of OLED Lighting applications. PixClear materials can be incorporated into OLED lighting panels as an internal light extraction and smoothing layer, delivering more than twice the amount of light currently extracted in OLED lighting devices.

Researchers from Korea's Ulsan Institute of Technology announced that they have developed a new technique that can improve the efficiency of Iridium-doped phosphorescent emitters by more than 30 times.

The team explained that this dramatic increase in efficiency was achieved by a new method to synthesize molecules - which resulted in "stronger" molecules. More precisely, the researchers created an emitter molecule in which the two carborane units were thethered by an alkylene linker.

Anandtech posted an interesting article discussing the power consumption of Samsung's AMOLED displays, from the GS4 to the GS6. The basic results are show in the graph below, which compares the power consumption of a completely white screen at different brightness levels:

You can see that The GS4 is by far the worst performing screen of the bunch. Samsung is consistently improving its AMOLED displays, but from the GS5 onwards it also introduced PSR (Panel Self Refresh) functionality which helps reduce power consumption on static images.

A few days ago, the US Energy Department (DoE) announced its tenth round of efficient SSL lighting awards, awarding more than $8.2 million to nine projects. Today the DoE released more details about the projects it awarded in this round. There are four OLED projects, awarded a total of $3.8 million.

Acuity Brands received $455,131 to develop an OLED Luminaire with integrated DC current drivers in each panel and advanced controls. The goal is to demonstrate a luminaire with an efficacy of 65 lm/W and a luminous output of 4,000 lumens.

Researchers from Japan (Chihaya Adachi of Kyushu University) and California have shown that OLED devices made with finely patterned structures are brighter and more efficient compared to regular OLEDs. The key finding in their research is that when the charge transport and recombination are confined to small nanoscale areas, the electroluminescent efficiency is increased because roll-off is suppressed.

The researchers say that such a structure (which are made using electron-beam lithography) may finally enable OLED devices to be bright enough and efficient enough to be used as laser sources. The researchers fabricated a small OLED device that supports charge density injection of 2.8 kA/cm² while maintaining 100 times higher luminescent efficiency than previously observed.