Technical / Research - Page 109

Dr. Karsten Heuser, Director of OLED Lighting Technology at OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, is pleased with the excellent intermediate results. Our development team has reached a real milestone for warm white OLEDs with efficiency of 46 lm/W (CIE of 0.46/0.42 measured in the integrated sphere) and a 5,000-hour lifetime, at a brightness of 1,000 cd/m². With these significant increases, flat OLED light sources are approaching the values of conventional lighting solutions and are therefore becoming attractive for a wide variety of applications.

The color rendering index (CRI) of the almost 100 cm² prototype is 80. By March 2009, OSRAM researchers expect that a demonstrator for an energy-saving flat OLED light module comprising several tiles will be able to deliver an overall luminous flux of 500 lm from a power consumption of less than 10 W.

With their pleasant diffused light the color of which can be individually controlled OLEDs will enhance premium lighting design elements such as light tiles that can be attached to any surface. OLED light sources will be particularly welcome where their special properties as flat light sources offer a high quality of light and make a real impression in illuminated wall coverings, atmospheric canopies of light, and light partitions. For widespread applications it will be necessary to produce efficient OLEDs in large numbers at reasonably low cost an essential objective of the OPAL research project.

This breakthrough achievement in OLED lighting is a result of the OPAL research project (Organic Phosphoresce Diodes for Applications on the Lighting Market), an initiative launched by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and coordinated by OSRAM.

We are pleased with the opportunity to expand our relationship with LG Display beyond the Joint Evaluation Agreement we announced in February 2006, said Mary Jane Hellyar, President, Kodak Display Business, and Executive Vice President, Eastman Kodak Company. As we said during our recent investor meeting, OLED is an important technology that will help fuel Kodak’s future growth. Our goal is to see AMOLED panels that have been co-developed continue to appear in the industry during 2008.

AMOLED is the newest generation of display technology and will compete in the full spectrum of size ranges, said Andrew Sculley, General Manager and Vice President, Kodak’s Display Business. AMOLED technology offers superior product performance, and ultimately low-cost manufacturing advantages. We’re proud and pleased that LG Display has chosen to incorporate our OLED technology to power a variety of innovative new consumer display products.

Hyun He Ha, Executive Vice President and Head of Small & Medium Displays Business Unit at LG Display, said, The agreement will help strengthen our small and medium size OLED business, and bolster our position in the large OLED market in the long run. We expect the win-win relationship to create vast synergy for the OLED business of both companies.

The agreement with LG Display is the latest in a series of moves that Kodak has made as the company commercializes its innovative OLED technology. Recently, KAGA Electronics of Japan announced plans to introduce the world’s thinnest, lightest portable 1-Seg television featuring a full-color, 3.0-inch OLED display utilizing Kodak’s AMOLED technology, which includes Kodak’s patented Global Mura Compensation that provides overall yield improvement. The KODAK ELITE VISION AMOLED 1-Seg TV was co-developed by Kodak, LG Display, KAGA Electronics and Andes Electronics and will be available in Japan by the end of March 2008.

Mitsubishi Chemical is considering making OLED panels by an ink-jet printing process in order to lower production costs.

The ink-jet process is believed to be more efficient than the existing evaporation coating.

GE Global Research today announced the successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured OLED lighting devices. This demonstration is a key step toward making OLEDs and other high performance organic electronics products at dramatically lower costs than what is possible today.

Researchers have long dreamed of making OLEDs using a newspaper-printing like roll-to-roll process, said Anil Duggal, manager of GE’s Advanced Technology Program in Organic Electronics. Now we’ve shown that it is possible. Commercial applications in lighting require low manufacturing costs, and this demonstration is a major milestone on our way to developing low cost OLED lighting devices.

Duggal continued, Beyond OLEDs, this technology also could have broader impact in the manufacturing of other organic electronic devices such as organic photovoltaics for solar energy conversion, sensors and roll-up displays.

For businesses, architects, lighting designers and anyone interested in pushing the envelope to achieve increasingly energy-efficient lighting — and vastly expanded lighting design capabilities — today marks the day that viable, commercialized OLED lighting solutions are coming into view, said Michael Petras, GE Consumer & Industrial’s Vice President of Electrical Distribution and Lighting. We have more work to do before we can give customers access to GE-quality OLED solutions, but it’s now easier to envision OLEDs becoming another high-efficiency GE offering, like LEDs, fluorescent or halogen.

The demonstration of a low-cost, roll-to-roll process for OLED lighting represents the successful completion of a four-year, $13 million research collaboration among GE Global Research, Energy Conversion Devices and the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The goal of the collaboration was to demonstrate a cost-effective system for the mass production of organic electronics products such as flexible electronic paper displays, portable TV screens the size of posters, solar powered cells and high-efficiency lighting devices.

ECD Senior Vice President Nancy Bacon said, This program was a major step in developing high volume roll-to-roll manufacturing for OLEDs and other organic semiconductor devices. The success of this program is testimony to the effectiveness of NIST’s advanced technology program model, and our 20-year history of pioneering research in roll-to-roll technology. We currently are utilizing this technology to mass produce our flexible, durable and lightweight UNI-SOLAR brand solar laminates. ECD looks forward to continuing collaboration with GE to further develop this technology for future commercialization.

GE researchers provided the organic electronics technology and were responsible for developing the roll-to-roll processes, while ECD provided its unique roll-to-roll equipment-building expertise to build the machine that manufactures the OLED devices. The machine is being utilized for further manufacturing research at GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York.

The development of this low cost roll-to-roll manufacturing process has the potential to eliminate the manufacturing hurdles that currently exist in preventing a more widespread adoption of high performance organic electronics technologies such as OLED lighting. The unique commercial equipment and technology needed to enable high performance-based organic electronics products does not currently exist. The few organic electronics products on the market today are made with more conventional batch processes and are relatively high cost. A roll-to-roll manufacturing infrastructure that enables high performance and low cost devices will allow a more widespread adoption of organic electronics products.

Summary:

• Red phosphorescent emitter functions optimally with Novaled’s proprietary technology for highly power-efficient OLEDs


• Delivers lifetime of 50,000 hours at initial brightness of 1,000 cd/sqm


• Supports market trend toward high-performance, low-voltage OLED devices

Ciba has developed a deep red phosphorescent OLED emitter that functions optimally in combination with the Novaled PIN OLED™ technology, delivering a lifetime of 50,000 hours at an initial brightness of 1,000 cd/sqm. The new material supports the market trend toward high-performance, low-voltage OLED devices for display and lighting applications.

We want to provide the market with efficient phosphorescent materials, says Rolf Drewes, Global Head of Business Line Electronic Materials at Ciba. In this project, we are developing the full color range of emitters compatible with Novaled’s proprietary OLED technology. Our deep red, the first to become commercially available, offers customers not only long-lifetime performance but also excellent thermal stability. Green and blue are now in progress.

Phosphorescent emitter materials together with low-voltage devices are mandatory for the future of the OLED industry, and Novaled is very pleased to see a key industry player developing such materials, adds Gildas Sorin, CEO of Novaled AG. This deep red phosphorescent material provides a long lifetime at a lowest operating voltage of 3.3 V as well as good power efficiency of 8.1 lm/W, making it suitable for displays as well as for completely new lighting applications. OLED technology even has potential to surpass the efficiency of energy-saving bulbs.

Made of thin organic material layers only a few nanometers thick, OLEDs are semiconductors that emit light in a diffuse way to form an area light source. In 2006, Ciba and Novaled entered an industrial collaboration to create organic dopant and transport materials for the Novaled PIN OLED™ technology, which enables highly power-efficient OLED performance.

OLED displays are manufactured from a sandwich of different materials including the electron transport layer. This layer is critical to the efficiency, voltage, and lifetime of the total display based on the electron conductivity performance of the material.

E278ST has been developed as a like-for-like replacement in manufacturing lines for aluminium quinolate (Alq3), the electron transport layer most commonly used throughout the OLED industry.

E278ST provides significant technical and performance benefits compared with Alq3. The new electron transport material has lower toxicity, lower voltage, higher electroluminescent efficiency, longer lifetime and lower voltage drift.

In customer trials, OLED-T has demonstrated a two-fold increase in device lifetime and a 25 per cent reduction in device voltage. A fluorescent red device’s voltage was reduced from 8V to 6V at 500 cd/m2 and showed a 20 per cent power efficiency improvement. Voltage drift was reduced by 25 per cent over the first 500 hours of operation.

The new material is organic and contains no metals. The new material complements OLED-T’s already strong OLED material portfolio.

E278ST offers superior performance as an electron transport material in both passive matrix and active matrix OLED displays compared with existing materials. It can be used as a direct replacement and upgrade path for aluminium quinolate, ensuring that display manufacturers can gain benefits using existing manufacturing processes, said Myrddin Jones, CEO, OLED-T.

OLED-T will begin customer sampling of E278ST from the second quarter of 2008 and will commence volume production from the fourth quarter of 2008. The new material complements OLED-T’s already strong OLED material portfolio.

Europe joins forces in the form of a new integrated R&D project that aims to research and develop light emitting foils based on OLED technology. A group of 14 companies, research institutes and universities, leading in the fields of printing and electronics has formed the consortium of Fast2Light and will align efforts to demonstrate that high quality and cost-efficient lighting foils are the future for lighting and signage applications.

"The steady progress of light-emitting materials in recent years, identify OLED technology as the next solid-state, large-area light source. Within this project consortium we are able to combine European leading partners in the fields of printing, electronics and roll-to-roll processing and to create critical mass for the development of OLED lighting foils. Fast2light aims to set in place the manufacturing platforms so as to accelerate the introduction of lighting foils into the market when the light-emitting polymers meet the product specs" said Mary Kilitziraki of Holst Centre, project manager of Fast2Light.

The project, partially funded under European Union’s 7th Framework program as part of the ICT (Organic and large area electronics, visualisation and display systems) priority, will address all layers that are part of a lighting foil. It will start with the plastic substrate, and introduce high-throughput deposition and patterning methods for all of the materials necessary to fabricate the final lighting foil. Ultimately, the project will demonstrate a 30cm x 30cm, high quality lighting foil, manufactured with new optimised, disruptive R2R processes. While the project will focus on polymers, the platforms developed will be fully compatible with SMOLEDs.

As we reported last week, Dialog Semiconductor has announced an interesting new technology called SmartXtend. The technology gives PMOLED displays a boost in terms of video quality and performance - they claim it will be just ilke AMOLED, at a much lower cost.

Now we got some more information from them, attached below. The summary -

"SmartXtend™ reduces peak current by driving more than one row at a time. In particular, each video frame is decomposed into two sub-frames. During the first of these sub-frames the rows are driven two at a time with the same data. That is, a lower peak current is applied over a longer period of time. During the other sub-frame ‘corrective’ data is added to each row to give each pixel its individual color.

Dialog Semiconductor is the first to have found a way to perform the necessary calculations in a cost effective manner suitable for application to low power, mobile devices. Using this driving scheme SmartXtend™ can reduce peak current through each diode by up to 30 percent. For example, a PMOLED panel driven with the conventional scheme requires about 150uA per anode, whereas only 100uA is required to drive the same panel when SmartXtend™ is used."

Dialog also claim they can reduce power consumption - "SmartXtend™ reduces average power consumption using a number of proprietary techniques that reduce the number of pre-charge cycles, the current and the voltage. Using these techniques SmartXtend™ can reduce power of the whole display subsystem by up to 30 percent."

Corning has announced some a couple of new  interesting technologies related to OLEDs and glass -

• Jade(TM) - a fusion-formed glass with high thermal stability designed to enable smaller devices with brighter displays, higher resolution, and longer battery life. Jade's attributes also enable optimal backplane performance for organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), self-luminous displays that use organic compounds to emit light displays.
• Vita(TM) - a scalable hermetic sealing solution that locks out moisture and air from OLED displays, improving their longevity. Together, Jade and Vita will help OLED technology scale to larger applications.

Read more here (TMCNet)

Dialog Semiconductor has announced its new SmartXtend(TM) technology that will allow the main displays of many mobile devices - particularly those offering W-QVGA and QVGA resolution - to utilize passive matrix OLED displays rather than LCD or active matrix OLEDs. Passive matrix OLEDs are available at a much lower cost compared to active matrix OLEDs while providing the same advantages in terms of video quality and performance.

The new SmartXtend(TM) technology, which utilizes a number of innovative design techniques including a unique multi-line addressing scheme, accurate dynamic current matching and state-of-the-art power management, will form the basis of a new family of display drivers to be developed by Dialog Semiconductor for passive matrix OLEDs. SmartXtend(TM) is designed to significantly extend the lifetime of passive matrix OLED displays; it reduces the peak current by up to 30 percent and power consumption by up to 30 percent compared to the conventional passive matrix driving scheme.

Read more here