Technical / Research - Page 11

Researchers from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities managed to deposit flexible OLED devices using 3D printing. The whole OLED stack (including the electrodes, interconnects, insulation, and encapsulation) was printed using a table-top 3D printer (custom build, and reportedly costing like a Tesla Model S).

The researchers used the new method to create a low-cost flexible OLED display of sort, made from relatively large pixels (see video above). The whole panel is 1.5 x 1.5 inch in size, with 64 pixels. The team is now working to improve the density of the process.

LG Display unveiled its latest OLED TV technology, branded as OLED EX. LG says that these WOLED panels combine new deuterium compounds and personalized algorithms to improve the image quality and increase brightness by up to 30%. EX is an acronym of Evolution and eXperience.

LG Display says that it has "successfully converted the hydrogen elements present in organic light emitting elements into stable deuterium". LGD extracts the deuterium compounds from water, and after stabilization, the compounds allow the OLED devices to be brighter - and also last longer.

OLEDON says that it has developed a new curved plane-source evaporation shadow mask process that can be used for OLED microdisplay fabrication, with a potential density of 10,000 PPI (minimum shadow distance of 0.18um). Using this technology it will be possible to create direct-emission microdisplays.

In the video above, you can see the lecture OLEDON's CEO gave last month at iMID 2021, that explains the new technology.

In 2020, US-based Kebotix was awarded with a US DoE grant to develop AI-based molecular screening technology to identify novel blue OLED emitters. The company now announced that it has managed to discover several new classes of candidate materials, and develop device prototypes.

Kebotix says it aims to start testing these molecules with device makers in early- to mid-2022.

Korea-based OLUM Material announced that it is starting to develop fine metal masks (FMM) for 8.5-Gen (2200x2500 mm) OLED production. Current FMM technologies are limited to 6-Gen substrates (1500x1850 mm).

As demand for larger mobile OLED displays, for laptops, tablets and monitors is on the rise, OLED makers aim to start making these panels on larger substrates. Samsung Display is considering, according to reports, a 8.5-Gen AMOLED fab dedicated for laptop and IT displays.

Researchers from Jilin Univeristy in Changchun, China, have managed to improve the brightness of OLED devices by 25% (21 enhancement in current efficiency) by applying corrugated alloy (Ag-Al) electrodes.

AFM images of the corrugated alloy electrodes

The researchers say that the periodic corrugations were precisely tuned based on the composition ratio of the alloy to efficiently recover the photons trapped in surface plasmon-polariton resonance.

Researchers from Europe, working with funding from the EU research program at the MOLOKO project, developed a new plasmonic sensor system that integrates an organic light-emitting transistor (OLET), an organic photo-diode (OPD), and a nanostructured plasmonic grating (NPG) all in the same device.

The researchers say that this design enables to create cost-effective and highly miniaturized optical sensors based on the optics-less plasmonic system. The researchers further say that the potential of OLETs, as planar multielectrode devices with inherent micrometer-wide emission areas, offers the incorporation of the light-emitting and light-detection modules together at unprecedented lateral proximity.

Organic-TFT backplane/emitter developer Mattrix Technologies has demonstrated a new AMOLED display prototype that is based on an amorphous-silicon (a:Si) backplane.

Mattrix believes that its proprietary vertical, organic light-emitting transistor (VOLET) pixel technology can dramatically reduce OLED production costs and improve display quality.

Last year, Poland-based Ergis Group launched an OLED encapsulation film platform called Ergis noDiffusion®. The company is currently testing its film solutions at customer sites in Asia, the EU and the US, and it is now starting to expand the platform for the protection of quantum dot films (QD films) used in display and lighting applications.

These new films can be tuned to fit specific needs. Ergis can deploy its films on several substrate types, with varying film thickness, and the barrier properties can be tuned to be between 10^-6 to 10^-3. This means that custom films can be created to suit the specific sensitivity of the QDs for water vapor and to achieve specific product lifetime or other required properties.

The National Center for Flexible Electronics (FlexE) was established in 2014 as a Centre of Excellence at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur. The vision of the center is to "catalyse the development of domestic industry in the field of large area flexible electronics".

The FlexE center has some interesting OLED projects, and we recently had a discussion with researchers from the center to learn more about the OLED R&D activities.