Power consumption - Page 29

Universal Display announced new warm-white OLED lighting panels that uses all-phosphorescent materials to achieve 58 lm/W and 30,000 lifetime (D70). This new panel is based on UDC's new light blue material system. This new panels offers a three times improvement in lifetime compared to just one year ago.

The company is actually showing two new panels, both 15x15cm in size. The first has a color temperature of 2,580K, 58 lm/W, 30,000 hours of lifetime (D70) at 1,000cd/m² and a CRI of 83. The second panel offers a color temperature of 2,950K and CRI of 82 - to achieve 62 lm/W. The second panel has 18,000 hours of lifetime (D70) at 1,000cd/m². Shown above is UDC's new OLED lighting design (called the Earthouse) which highlights the ability for energy-efficient white OLEDs to emit different white colors. It uses an energy-efficient 3,000K white OLED on the left and a 5,000K white OLED on the right.

Mitsubishi Chemical and Pioneer announced that they managed to fabricate a white OLED in which the emissive layer was formed in a coating process (not sure if they mean spin-coating or printing). The OLED is efficient (52 lm/W) and the lifetime (LT50) is 20,000 hours (at 1,000cd/m² luminance). The upper layers in this OLED are made using vapor-deposition method. The companies plan to commercialize printed OLEDs at around 2014.

Mitsubishi's Velve panels (which will start shipping soon) use a coating process only for the foundation layer and not the emissive layer. In September 2009 we interviewed Verbatim's OLED team (which will market Mitsubishi's OLED panels).

Novaled announced that it has developed a new efficient (36 lm/W) fluorescent white OLED, which the company claims is the world's most power efficient white OLED structure. Novaled used their own proprietary organic materials and a new flat light outcoupling method of extraction and achieved an increase in light emission by more than 80%, with good color rendering. Novaled's new structure also has an improved light angular dependence.

Here's more technical info from Novaled's press release: 

Samsung Mobile Display started producing AMOLED panels in their new 5.5-Gen (1,300x1,500mm) fab in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province, South Korea. This is actually two months ahead of schedule. The official celebration will take place next month.

Samsung 5.5-gen fab groundbreaking ceremony

This is just the first line in Samsung's new fab - which will produce 24,000 substrates a month. The next stage (line 2) is scheduled for the end of 2011 (and will double the capacity to 48,000 monthly substrates). The third line is planned for the first half of 2012, and this will bring monthly capacity to 100,000 substrates. Total investment for this new fab is around $2.2 billion.

A couple of weeks ago we reported about new organic-TFT developed by University of Florida researchers, and now we've got some more info. The new transistor design is carbon nanotube based and it can efficiently drive the high-currents OLEDs need, at lower voltages than other designs.

The researchers not only designed a new transistor, but they combined it with emitting materials into a single design, called an OLET (we first reported about OLETs back in May 2010). The new design is called a CN-VOLET (Carbon Nanotube Vertical OLET). They say that this new design is more than eight-times more efficient than other competing devices. It also exhibits longer lifetime and should be easy to manufacture.

eMaginn introduced new low-power/high-contrast 0.5" diagonal VGA OLED-XL microdisplays that feature 15-micron pixels, 10,000:1 contrast ratio, a coltage drive pixel approach and eMagin's True Black technology that uses less than 60mW (which is less than half of the requirement for eMagin's SVGA+ OLED-XL microdisplays). eMagin says that the new display is useful for military, industrial and commercial applications (including thermal weapon sights, laser target designators, and industrial thermal imaging cameras).

The new microdisplays use pulse width modulation (PWM) pixel hold times (a first time for eMagin) to virtually eliminate motion artifacts in video imagery, with the extra benefit of providing better dimming range and gray level response for low light and night vision applications.

Update: we got some new information regarding Philips and KM cooperation

Philips unveiled their latest OLED lighting panel, the Lumiblade Plus - which is the world's most efficient panel under production (45lm/w). Currently available in one size (Square Tall White - 7x7cm) the panel was developed by Konica Minolta and is produced by Philips, and features full phosphorescent organic materials. The panel is available for €120 (minimum quantity is 100 units though).

Technical details of this new panel:

• Luminous efficacy: 45 lm/W
• Thickness: 1.8 mm
• Lifetime: 10,000 hours
• Luminance: 1,000 cd/m²
• Current/voltage: 71.5 mA / 3.6 V
• Color coordinates (x; y): 0.45 ; 0.41
• Color temperature: 2,800 K

Researchers from the University of Toronto discovered that using chlorine can drastically reduce OLED device complexity and improve its efficiency. In fact in their tests, the efficiency more than doubled at very high brightness. The idea is to add a one-atom thick sheet of chlorine on the ITO electrode used in OLEDs. This can make the electrode a more efficient electrical transport - and so there's no need for a 'transport' layer as used in current designs.

The researchers developed a UV light assisted process to achieve chlorination (which negates the need for chlorine gas) - and so the whole process is easy to engineer, safe and reliable. The new OLED which used the CI-ITO electrode achieved a record efficiency of 50% at 10,000 cd/m².

Lumiotec sent us some interesting updates today. First of all, the company is already producing and shipping their second generation panels. They call these the 'standard' panels, or Version 2.0. The older panels (like the one we reviewed a while back) is referred to as 'pre series' or Version 1.0. The new panels offer better efficiency and lifetime and come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors. They also cost a lot less then the first version - ranging from €115 to €350 (so the large square is down from around €700 to €260!). You can see Lumiotec's updated datasheet here.

A while back we reported that Rohm developed a new OLED lighting panel that uses a red phosphorescent material - which results in a much more efficient panel (25-30lm/W). We assumed that Lumiotec's Version 2.0 panels use Rohm's new panels - but sadly this is not the case. The Ver 2.0 are still all fluorescent, and the efficiency is just a little over 10.5lm/W. Lumiotec says that they consider phosphorescent materials a must for efficient panels and they do plan to go down that route in the future.

Researchers from the University of Michigan developed an efficient fluorescent blue OLED. The ceiling for the efficiency of such OLEDs was believe to be around 5%, and the new OLEDs are close to 10%. The new material is a computer-simulations assisted redesign of a current material used by the University collaborators in Singapore.