Technical / Research - Page 125

An Edinburgh firm that makes displays so tiny they could be used to put a TV set on a pair of glasses, announced its first exports yesterday. MicroEmissive Displays shipped its low-power OLED polymer displays to Asia to be used in "night scopes" for the leisure market.

The high-resolution but tiny screens are ideal for "near to eye" mobile uses. Bill Miller, chief executive of the Aim-listed company, said: "The start of production and the first shipment to a customer represent significant milestones for MED. There is still much to do but we look forward to 2006 with confidence."

Displaychips Inc has launched an OLED driver chip (DC3100), which is said to integrate DC-DC converter for the first time in the world. The chip doesn't need an additional external DC-DC converter to drive the passive-matrix OLEDs, resulting in 10 to 15% cost reduction of the module assembly.

Based on a 0.20µm CMOS process, the chip adopts a low current consumption algorithm backed by a patented technology. The pre-charge technology is said to reduce power consumption to 50% of the established OLED driver ICs.

Fraunhofer IPMS offers customer/application-specific developments based on highly efficient OLEDs in combination with the novel fabrication technology based on the world-wide first vertical In-line fabrication system for organic light emitting diodes.

Especially for OLED light sources the cost pressure on the fabrication is enormous. The Fraunhofer IPMS will show on the fair the first time a novel fabrication combination to achieve low cost fabrication for lighting applications. One important aspect for fabrication cost is the used ground contact, which is commonly build by the use of ITO, a widely used contact material for LCD displays. Due to grow of display fabrication the cost for ITO increases drastically over the past 3 years by a factor of three. For low cost fabrication a low cost alternative for ITO have to be used. The Fraunhofer IPMS makes investigations, inside of the European largest OLED lighting project named OLLA (High brightness OLEDs for ICT & Next Generation Lighting Applications), to replace ITO by a new low cost material named ZAO (Aluminium doped ZnO) . Large area highly efficient OLEDs on this low cost anode material will be shown on the fair.

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Mitsubishi Chemical today announced that it has developed an Organic Light-Emitting Diode device with the highest efficiency in the world in its new blue phosphorescence OLED material.

The new OLED material, which can be produced by a lower-cost, wet-coating process, is expected to open the way to the development of a new class of large flat-panel displays.

The newly developed OLED device employs MCC's own blue phosphorescence host material (wet-coating type), hole blocking material, and hole injection material to optimize the design of a device to achieve the current efficiency of 30 cd/A at the intensity of 100 cd/m2 (external quantum efficiency: 13%), more than twice that of conventional blue wet-coating type OLEDs.

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) announces two major milestones in the development of long lifetime, high efficiency light emitting polymers for full color, video capable displays.

A phosphorescent red device has been produced by CDT and Sumitomo Chemical which has a lifetime of half a million hours from an initial luminance of 100cd/m(2); this is a record for lifetime of solution-processable materials of any color. The efficiency is also improved at over 7cd/A. Red efficiency is especially important as this color consumes the largest share of power input in a color device, so improvements in red efficiency have important practical implications.

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) and Sumitomo Chemical have confirmed that their Joint Venture company, Sumation, commenced trading on November 14th 2005.

Sumation supplies polymers and formulated inks for use in both development and commercial P-OLED display and lighting applications. The company is headquartered in Tokyo, and has an R & D team located in both the UK and Japan, while production of polymer materials will take place under sub contract at the Sumitomo Chemical plant in Osaka.

National Semiconductor Corp has introduced a small dual step-up DC-DC converter that drives up to five white LEDs with a constant current or an organic LED display with a constant voltage.

Well-suited for handheld devices such as flip and clam-shell cell phones and digital cameras, the LM3520 step-up converter uses pulse width modulation (PWM) mode to drive the LEDs and pulse frequency modulation (PFM) mode to drive the organic LED display. When driving the LEDs, a single external resistor is used to set the maximum LED current. The actual LED current and the brightness can be adjusted by applying a PWM signal to the enable pin. When the LED drive is disabled, the LED string is disconnected on the low side so that there is no leakage current through the LEDs.

MagnaChip today announced the launch of its PMOLED QCIF+ two-chip solution, the HM16EPS7201 chip and the HM16EPC7101 chip.

These chips are designed for the main display on mobile devices and specifically the MP3 display market. They are the first chips to support QCIF+ resolution.

These chips offer one of the highest resolutions available in PMOLED technology. The HM16EPS7201 chip can support 220RGB (column line), while the HM16EPC7101 chip supports 176 (Row line). Notable MP3, mobile and panel companies are currently evaluating these unique product offerings.

These products are scheduled to go into mass production in the first half of 2006. The HM16EPS7201 chip is produced at MagnaChip's F5 located in Cheongju and the HM16EPC7101 at MagnaChip's F3 in Gumi.

The OSRAM Pictiva Reference Design Kit from Anders Electronics provides a turnkey hardware platform that allows designers to quickly power up, initialise, test various modes, and display images on the on-board OLED module via a host desktop or laptop PC. A user friendly PC interface is also provided, supporting useful functions including contrast level adjustment and gamma tables.

The board includes a 128 x 64 pixels OSRAM Pictiva OLED display, 8051 microcontroller and on-board serial flash memory, enabling designers to quickly begin developing software. The kit also includes GUI reference design and graphics generation source code for firmware, plus necessary cables and comprehensive documentation. Electronic documents provided include driver data sheets, users manual and seven application notes guiding designers through OLED driver register setup, communication protocols, power, image and lifetime optimisation, plus further essential knowledge to complete an OLED design. Schematics, gerber files and bill of materials are also included, to speed up hardware development.

The 128 x 64 pixels OLED display provided on board the Pictiva development kit has 100 nits luminance, 160° viewing angle, 100:1 contrast ratio, and operating temperature range -30° to 70° C.

A wide range of similar OLED display modules are also available from Anders Electronics, in popular display formats including 80x48, 96x36, 96x64 and 128x48, as well as 128x64.

Sony announced that it will jointly develop OLED materials with Japanese oil company Idemitsu Kosan. The two companies will also cross-licence OLED-related patents as part of the joint development plan, which was spelled out in a memorandum of understanding signed by the two companies in Tokyo today.

Sony and Idemitsu are expecting to sign a formal deal by the end of January. The deal will (initially) cover a 5-year development effort.