Power consumption - Page 27

Japan's Tazmo has developed a new flexible Inorganic LED panel that is quite efficient at 30 lm/W. Tazmo is using a coating process - which is easily adapter for I-LEDs as they have a simpler element structure when compared to OLEDs.

The new panel is A4 in size (210x297mm) and can easily be bent. I-LED is different from LEDs as they use the EL (electroluminescence) phenomenon. We do not know how close to commercialization this is.

Japan's Oji Paper developed a new microfabrication technology that can be used to enhance the light extraction efficiency of OLEDs. The idea is to use microparticle coating to form a regular pattern that is several-nanometer-wide on the surface of the metal part of the negative electrode in an OLED panel. The nanostructure turns the plasmon energy (that is sometimes released from an OLED) into light.

Oji paper says that this technology was used to improve a red OLED's light extraction efficiency by about 100%. They are now working to apply this to a white OLED.

Lumiotec signed a new OLED technology license agreement with Universal Display - and will integrate UDC's technology and materials into their OLED lighting products. Lumiotec will pay license fees and running royalties to UDC, and the term of the agreement runs through December 31, 2015.

Lumiotec OLED lamps

Lumiotec says that they will start delivering sample panels next month (February 2012) - mainly 145x145 mm square panels - with warm white color and 40 lm/W efficiency. The company will start mass production these panels by April. Lumiotec also says that they are developing high-efficient natural white panels - and these will be released sometime during 2012.

Update: LG Electronics revealed the model number (55EL9600) and posted some new photos and more details on the OLED TV...

LG Display announced that they will unveil a new 55" OLED TV panel at CES 2012, and offered some more details and a couple of photos. Last month LG said that their OLED TVs will be available in the middle of 2012. The panel is only 5mm thick, and is also lighter than LCD panels. It features a 100,000:1 contrast ratio, fast refresh rates and a wide color gamut (wider than LCD, according to LG). They also say that the TV is more power efficient than an LCD TV, but they wouldn't give any details yet.

LG Display's panel uses an Oxide-TFT backplane (this was announced before). According to LG this backplane offers an identical image to LTPS panels, while being significantly cheaper. The TV uses a white-OLED with color filter design (this was the technology LGD acquired from Kodak back in 2009).

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.

OSRAM announced that they developed a new flexible OLED with an efficiency of 32 lm/W - which makes is the world's most efficient OLED lighting panel (according to OSRAM). The new panel is made on a thin steel foil with a thickness of approximately 100 micrometers - like a sheet of paper. OSRAM developed a new electrode design for this top-emitter OLED panel, which brightness is fixed at 1,000 cd/m².

OSRAM's flexible OLED research was conducted as part of the TOPAS 2012 project - the same project in which OSRAM developed the 87 lm/W white OLED panel back in June.

Prof. Daisuke Yokoyama from the Yamagata University in Japan published an interesting research paper about molecular orientation in small-molecule OLEDs. Daisuke says that orienting the molecules horizontally has two positive effects: the light outcoupling efficiency is increased (by around 50% compared to randomly oriented emitters) and the charge transport between molecules becomes more efficient (which can lead to a lower driving voltage).

Daisuke tells us that some materials in commercial OLEDs are already horizontally oriented - but not all. He claims that most phosphorescent emitters are not horizontally oriented yet. If so, we can expect good performance increases once these materials are oriented.

Researchers from the University of Toronto developed the world's most efficient OLED on plastic, which they say is comparable with the best glass-based OLEDs. They discovered that coating the plastic substrate with a 50-100 nano-meter thick layer of tantalum(V) oxide (Ta2O5), an advanced optical thin-film coating material enabled them to re-construct the high-refractive index property previously limited to heavy metal-doped glass:

The researchers say that to create a high-efficiency OLED you need a high-refractive-index (n 10,000 cd/m².

Konica Minolta announced a new next-generation lighting brand called Symfos. The first Symfos product is the OLED-010K OLED lighting panel sample kit - which is now shipping. The kit includes four OLED panels, and external driver box and an AC adapter.

The OLED itself uses all phosphorescent emitters (KM is using Universal Display's PHOLED technology) and offers 45 lm/W. This is the same panel that Philips is offering (as the Lumiblade Plus). In fact Philips is producing this panel for Konica Minolta, as was announced in July 2011. We do not know the price of the OLED-010K kit, but Philips is selling each Lumiblade Plus panel for €120.

Panasonic Electric Works announced that they developed a new highly efficient OLED device - featuring 128 lm/W efficiency. This was achieved using a semi-spherical highly-refractive lens to enhance light extraction. The OLED panel is small - only 2x2 mm, and according to Panasonic this is the world's most efficient white OLED.

PEW says that in order to achieve this high efficiency, they inserted a light extraction layer composed of a highly-refractive material between the emissive layer (EML) and the glass substrate. The back side uses a high-reflectivity metal material. Detailed calculations were performed to minimize the internal reflection - this doubled the light extraction efficiency to 40%. This panel uses all-phosphorescent materials, and PEW says that this technique is actually similar to the technique used by Universal Display when they developed the 102 lm/W device back in 2008.