Power consumption - Page 35

Samsung Mobile Display's president of engineering Brian Berkeley said yesterday that Samsung is accelerating its development of OLED displays, including increasing the size and volume to enable rollout of OLED TVs. Samsung has been critical of OLED TVs in the past years, but things are changing: there's high volume AMOLED production, with millions of OLED displays for mobile devices shipping each month.

Samsung 30-inch 3D OLED TV prototype

Samsung are now making huge investments in OLEDs, including development of medium to large sized panels. They are actually working on how to scale a Gen 4 sized plants (like they have today) to a Gen 7 or even a Gen 8, which will be able to make TV panels economically. This will require either much more powerful lasers working much more quickly than today's process for creating the backplane on which they deposit the OLEDs, or some alternative technology. There are also issues in color patterning, for which Samsung thinks it has a new unique solution, and OLED printing.

Berkeley predicts that a 40" OLED TV will use only 10 watts in about five years (compared to 40 watts today for a 40" LCD). He also said that the technology will be great for 3D TVs (image switching is quicker and so left and right images are completely separated).

The OLED100.eu project has won the Best Energy Efficient project award in Europe's ICT (International Telecommunication Union) competition. They actually won it together with Beywatch (tools for environmental management and energy efficiency). Both project will get €10,000 (there were 39 candidates altogether). OLED100.eu have also send us a new photo of a large-area OLED panel (by Philips Research):

Large Area OLED Lighting

OLED100.eu is an integrated European research project to accelerate the development of OLED Lighting technologies. It received €12.5 million funding and focuses on five main goals:

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  High power efficacy (100 lm/W)
  


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  Long lifetime (100.000 h)
  


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  Large area (100x100 cm2)
  


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  Low-cost (100 Euro/m2)
  


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  Measurement standardization / application research
  

A few days ago we posted about DisplayMate's Nexus-One display tests. Basically they are very unhappy with the OLED's performance, especially when compared to the iPhone's LCD.

Now Barry Young from the OLED-Association has sent us his response to these tests:

Last week, there was an incredible amount of Internet chatter, generated by one well-regarded tester (DisplayMate) and one blogger (DisplayBlog) comparing the AMOLED display in the Nexus I with the LTPS LCD in the iPhone. In short, according to the tester, the AMOLED didn’t measure up. The evaluation was, to my knowledge, the first in-depth scientific comparison of the two displays. Did they help or just confuse the situation? There was a time when display architectures and the measurements of performance were relatively simple:
 

The DisplayBlog and DisplayMate are working on an interesting series of tests for Google's Nexus One phone AMOLED display and the iPhone's 3GS display. It's not finished yet, but they have posted the first tests of the AMOLED display. There's a lot of technical information, but here are the main conclusions:

• The OLED is 800x480, but uses PenTile technology, that has two-thirds of the total number of sub-pixels found on an 800x480 LCD, so it won’t be quite as sharp as a typical 800x480 display.
• The display has only 16-bits color depth, with just 32 or 64 intensity levels. DisplayMate say this is unacceptable for a high performance phone such as the Nexus One. The colors are coarse and inaccurate as a result. 
• The display is excellent for text, icons and menu graphics, but poor for image and awful for resolution scaling. The problem with resolution scaling lies in the Android OS which uses a "laughably primitive scaling algorithm".
• The peak white brightness is just 229 cd/m2 which is rather poor.
• The black brightness is outstanding (0.0035 cd/m2) - so dark it is hard to measure or even detect.
• The contrast ratio (65416) is great, the highest they have measured for a production display.
• The screen reflectance is relatively high and washes out the image, makes it hard to view in bright conditions. 
• The phone uses Dynamic Color and Dynamic Contrast which results is exaggerated colors and stretching of images.

Here's a nice offer: you can get a fully paid-for house in Sydney if you volunteer to experience an eco-friendly smart home. This smart home includes solar panels, a fuel-cell, an electric car, and an OLED TV (probably Sony's XEL-1). One lucky family (it's gotta be a family with kids) will get this house for about a year, during which they'll try out the different technologies and blog about it, of course. The aim is to save between 20% to 50% of the energy required for such a house using the new technologies. 

Hurry up - registration closes on February 22nd 2008...

Philips have lowered the price and improved the efficiency of their OLED Lighting panels. For example, the 44x47mm white rectangle, which used to cost €166 will now cost €72. The efficiency of their panels was between 10lm/W and 20lm/W. We can now expect over 20lm/W for the new panels.

Philips lumiblade blue square

Philips will also put more emphasis on white rectangular panels - as these has been the most popular from all shapes and colors. Philips also said that there have been no complaints so far, and all feedback has been good.

A couple of days ago we reported the Lumiotec plans to start shipping sample OLED Lighting panels next month. Now we have some more information, and a photo, too. The sample kits will include one OLED panel, a controller and an AC adapter:

The OLEDs are 142mm by 142mm, 4.1mm thick. The brightness is 4,000cd/m2, and the lifetime is said to be 30,000 at 1,000cd/m2. The power consumption is 14.1W (the voltage is 9.4V).

We already know that GE plans to start printing OLED Lighting panels in 2010. Now Anil Duggal, GE's OLED lighting printing group leader, says that they know that those pilot panels will be very expensive. He hopes that by 2015, it'll be possible to print OLED panels that will be both cheap and efficient.

GE has recently received $4 million from the DOE to upgrade their pre-pilot roll-to-roll manufacturing lines (the whole project will require $8 million).

Earlier today we reported that  The University of Rochester received a $1.2 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop host materials for white phosphorescent OLEDs. This funding is part of the DOE's Recovery Act Rewards, and now we have found the complete list, which contains several OLED Lighting projects:

• Cambrios got $1.2 million (out of $1.8 for the total project) for "Solution-Processable Transparent Conductive Hole Injection Electrode OLED SSL". This project seeks to develop a cost-effective replacement for indium tin oxide for use as an electrode in OLED lighting devices. Indium is both rare and very expensive. 
• The University of Rocherser got $1.2 million (out of $1.3 million) for "Development and Utilization of Host Materials for White Phosphorescent OLEDs". This project seeks to produce white OLEDs with > 100 lm/W efficiency after light extraction enhancement and > 10,000 hour operating time, by making a new class of emissive materials.
• PPG Industries got $1.6 million (out of $2.1 million) for "Low-Cost Integrated Substrate for OLED Lighting". PPG Industries plans to develop a new low-cost integrated substrate product that is suitable for OLED lighting manufacture and is compatible with PPG’s existing flat-glass and transparent-glass coating technologies and high-volume glass manufacturing methods.
• GE Global Research got $4 million (out of $8 million) for "Roll-to-Roll Solution-Processable Small-Molecule OLEDs". This project seeks to upgrade GE’s prepilot OLED roll-to-roll manufacturing line through improved high-performance phosphorescent small-molecule OLED materials, advanced OLED device architectures, plastic ultra-high barrier films, and an advanced encapsulation scheme.
• UDC got $4 million (out of $8.3 million) for "Creation of a U.S. Phosphorescent OLED Lighting Panel Manufacturing Facility". This project seeks to design and set up two pilot phosphorescent OLED (PHOLED) manufacturing lines. The team will implement UDC's PHOLED technology and provide prototype lighting panels to U.S. luminaire manufacturers to incorporate into products, to facilitate testing of design, and to gauge customer acceptance.

Interestingly, two of these project (the GE and UDC ones) involves actual OLED Lighting panels pilot production lines - which could lead to actual OLED products being commercially available.

The University of Rochester says they have received a $1.2 million to develop host materials for white phosphorescent OLEDs. The funding comes from the U.S. Department of Energy. This project seeks to produce white OLEDs with > 100 lm/W efficiency after light extraction enhancement and over 10,000 hour operating time, by making a new class of emissive materials.

Here's more information on the DOE's Recovery Act Rewards (which contains 4 other OLED projects).