Technical / Research - Page 36

The EU announced a new SSL lighting project called LASSIE (Large Area Solid State Intelligent Efficient luminaries) that aims to develop hybrid inorganic and organic lighting technologies. The aim is to develop a device with the efficacy and long life of high-power LEDs and the color-tunable diffuse lighting of OLED panels.

It's not clear, but it seems that the project will use the LEDs for the actual light output and fluorescent-based soluble OLED materials for tuning the color. According to CSEM (one of the project partners, the OLED material swill be deposited using a roll to roll process.

Back in June 2012 LG was awarded with Korea's ambitious Future Flagship Program that aims to develop 60" flexible transparent UHD OLED displays by 2017. This project raised a few eyebrows and was never mentioned again. Now we hear that LG Display is still developing the technology, and still says that the want to be ready with a real product by the end of 2017.

Flexible OLED TV concept (Sony)

LGD is currently developing a 17" transparent flexible OLED and they hope to ready a prototype by the end of 2014. If this is successful, LGD will move on to the next stage - the 60" UHD panel. This panel will feature 40% transmittance and a curvature radius of 10 cm.

Researchers from Mexico's Universidad Veracruzana developed a new OLED emitter molecule that can produce both Red, Green and Blue colors. These so-called multicromoforico molecules may enable simpler OLED material fabrication.

The researchers explain that the color of the emitted light in these new molecules can be modified by the addition of cromoforicas small molecules that bind to the main system through supramolecular interactions.

The UK's' Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) produced a range of flexible OLED lighting demonstrators. These prototypes were manufactured at CPI's OLED/OPV prototyping line. The CPI made several panels on a range of substrates with thickness ranging from 50µm to 125µm.

Those devices are made from an ITO anode, evaporated hole injection layer, co-evaporated emissive layer and a conventional cathode. The OLEDs are encapsulated using a pressure sensitive adhesive and a commercially available barrier material. The CPI's researchers are investigating a number of methods for device encapsulation and are collaborating with adhesive, getter, and barrier film suppliers.

A team of researchers from North Carolina State University have launched a new crowd funding project at Experiment.com, trying to raise a small amount of money ($400 to $800) to begin a new research that potentially may have implications for OLED applications, as they may enable simple and environmentally friendly OLED emitters.

The researchers developed a new method to form carbon-carbon bonds, which include the formation of spirocyclic carbon centers. Those kinds of molecules have been shown by others to be potentially useful as OLED materials but are difficult to synthesize in bulk, and this research hopes to solve this issue.

Update: It turns out that Plastic Logic didn't actually demonstrate the flexible OLED prototype. They did show a presentation, in which they revealed that the current first-gen prototype is monochrome (red) and quite simple. They do intend to keep producing new demonstrators throughout 2014.

Novaled (owned by Samsung) and Plastic Logic announced that during 2014 they will demonstrate truly flexible, plastic, full-organic AMOLED displays. The first-gen display was demonstrated at the FlexTech conference in Phoenix last week. Plastic Logic hopes that the technology will be ready for adoption by display makers towards the end of 2014.

The two companies say that this is the first time an all-plastic AMOLED produced in a low-temperature manufacturing process is demonstrated. The display uses Novaled's PIN OLED materials and Plastic Logic's OTFT backplane. The display also used organic materials from Merck (probably the emitters).

The UK's' Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) developed new backplane fabrication processes to allow the bending of Organic Thin Film Transistors (OTFT) arrays to small radii (1 mm) without a significant reduction in device performance. In the video below you can see a bending test of the OTFT array produced on a 50-micron thick PEN film. Those arrays can be bent up to 10,000 times.

The CPI hopes that these new processes will eventually lead to the adoption of such organic backplanes in OLED displays, and they say that the OTFTs feature a charge mobility that is "suitable" for OLED driving (although it was only 2 cm2/Vs. They have since upgraded it to 4 cm2/Vs) and they managed to fabricate display pixel-sized OTFTs.

Pixelligent Technologies has been awarded an SBIR Phase I grant by the US Department of Energy (DOE). The nine-month, $150,000 program will enable Pixelligent (in collaboration with OLEDWorks) to accelerate the development of its nanoadditives for use in OLED lighting.

The project is titled "Advanced Light Extraction Material for OLED Lighting", and its aim is to develop an internal light-extraction structure that will be fully compatible with OLED device manufacturing processes and operating conditions that can expedite the commercialization of white OLED lighting.

BASF and the Graphene Research Centre (GRC) at the National University of Singapore announced a new partnership to develop the use of graphene in organic electronics devices - such as OLED devices and OPVs. The goal of this collaboration is to interface graphene films with organic electronic materials, with an aim to create more efficient and flexible lighting devices.

In this collaboration, the GRC will contribute its graphene knowledge (the synthesis and characterization of the graphene) while BASF is focused on organic materials. Of course BASF is also engaged with graphene research (for several years) and are looking to speed up their device development with this new partnership.

The Holst Centre purchased a Kurt J. Lesker Super Spectros thermal evaporator, which expands the centre's OLED sheet-to-sheet production facilities. The new tool will increase throughput for hybrid solution-processed / evaporated OLEDs, speeding up testing of new process steps and materials.

The Holst Centre says that in the future, high volume OLED production is likely to use roll-to-roll processes, but in sheet-to-sheet processes provide an an important intermediate step. The centre will use the new Super Spectros thermal evaporator for depositing the light-emitting and charge-transport layers of small-molecule OLED devices.