Technical / Research - Page 29

According to India Times, the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras is seeking government funding to start a project to develop low-cost OLED production processes. The IIT estimate the project at Rs500 million (about $78 million).

The researchers at the IIT are looking at two technologies: a new patterning technology, and a silicon based substrate that will enable to integrate the backplane into the substrate and so lower costs.

FlexEnable (which was spun-off from Plastic Logic in February 2015) has joined the Graphene Flagship, the European $1 billion graphene research project. Last year Plastic Logic demonstrated the world's first display based on a graphene backplane (a 150-PPI active-matrix E Ink panel), and now we have some more details on the company's graphene OTFT goals.

That 2014 E Ink display used graphene as a transparent electrode. FlexEnable is still developing the technology, and now wants to use it in OLED displays and organic LCDs.

IGNIS Innovation announced that they have developed the world's first HDR mobile display. The so-called True Vision Display features a high contrast ratio, high frame rate, wide color gamut and high color precision and bit-depth. It's also very bright as required for HDR.

CSOT 5.5-inch MaxLife AMOLED prototype

Ignis will unveil their new display at SID's DisplayWeek 2015 next month, so we'll get more details. In the meantime, Ignis told us that this is a 5.5" HD AMOLED display that is extremely bright indeed at 1,500 nits (the Galaxy S6, for example, has a maximum brightness of 784 nits).

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is launching a new project called KONFECT that aims to develop flexible OLED glass for OLED applications. BMBF is awarded €5.6 million towards the three-year project that seeks to refine windable glass through lamination with functional adhesive tapes and by applying special functional layers.

The project consortium includes three partners - Schott, tesa and VON ARDENNE. Schott and tesa will develop reliable encapsulation by combining Schott's flexible glass with tesa's barrier tape while Von Ardenne will developing a vacuum coating system specifically for roll-to-roll (R2R) coating of flexible glasses.

A few days ago, the US Energy Department (DoE) announced its tenth round of efficient SSL lighting awards, awarding more than $8.2 million to nine projects. Today the DoE released more details about the projects it awarded in this round. There are four OLED projects, awarded a total of $3.8 million.

Acuity Brands received $455,131 to develop an OLED Luminaire with integrated DC current drivers in each panel and advanced controls. The goal is to demonstrate a luminaire with an efficacy of 65 lm/W and a luminous output of 4,000 lumens.

In April 2014 Taiwan's ITRI Institute developed a new technology that enables OLED lighting panels to be patterned with static grayscale images. The new technology is called Image Lighting and it be easily be fitted into a normal OLED production process.

Today ITRI sent us an update on that project. The researchers have been upgrading the process, and have now demonstrated a new panel prototype (which you can see above), that is 10x10 cm in size and has 220 grayscale levels (up from 200 a year ago).

Update: the DoE released more details about the new OLED projects

The US Energy Department (DoE) announced its tenth round of efficient SSL lighting awards. The DoE awarded more than $8.2 million for nine projects (with the private sector investing a further $3.2 million).

The DoE only detailed three LED projects and a single OLED project - which was awarded to Acuity Brands to develop an OLED with increased efficiency and light input. No other details were provided and we do not have information regarding the other five projects.

Researchers at the Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI) developed new ultra-thin OLED electrode material as an alternative to ITO that can achieve a curve radius of 0.1 mm. The new electrodes are made from silver nanowires and colorless polyimide, fused together.

The researchers say this electrode can survive being folded 100,000 times. It reaches 90% transmittance, with a sheet of 8 ohm/sq. Surface roughness is 0.8 nm, similar to regular smartphone glass substrates.

US-based Light Polymers announced a new coating material that improves the contrast and readability of OLED displays in bright sunlight. The material is based on the company's lyotropic liquid crystals, and can be coated on substrates such as TAC, acrylic and initially COP. The company also plans to enable reverse dispersion coatings directly on the OLED panel glass.

OLED behave quite poorly in bright ambient light - due to the reflective metal transistors. There are some solutions of course (Samsung's Super AMOLED and Nokia's Clear Black Display technologies are two examples) - and Light Polymers says that their solution is lower-cost, and can be coated directly on the OLED panel - something that cannot be done with other technologies.

The Fraunhofer Institute has been developing bi-directional OLED microdisplays for years, and they now demonstrate their latest prototype that features an SVGA resolution - up from VGA in the previous prototype shown in 2012.

Besides the increased resolution, the new microdisplay also features a higher resolution image sensor and an enhanced color depth. Fraunhofer also integrated more components directly into the microdisplay chip, which will make integration easier.