Technical / Research - Page 40

Researchers from the University of Utah developed a new polymer light emitting device that can be tuned to emit light of different colors, including white (without the need to mix several emitters). The new material is a polymer molecule doped with platinum. The same material can also be used to develop efficient OPVs or Spintronics-based memory devices.

The device currently being developed at Utah isn't an OLEDs as it only emits light when stimulated by other light (such as a laser) and not when simulated by an electrical current. But the researchers say that a white OLED based on this technology is possible and predict that it will be developed within two years. The current device isn't actually white, it emits colored color (more on this below) and they say it will take about one year till they manage to develop a white Pt-1 device.

In 2012 we posted about a the Spin-OLED, a new spin-polarized polymer efficient OLED device developed at the University of Utah and the Israeli Technion. Now Professor Z. Valy Vardeny from Utah gave a talk (titled "Spin Effects in Organic Optoelectronic Devices") describing the Spin-OLED in more details:

Professor Vardeny also gives an introduction to organic Spintronics and introduces the hybrid organic/inorganic spintronics device and explains how OPV can be enhanced by spin 1/2 radical additives.

Colnatec and Novaled announced today that the two companies will work together to test the performance Colnatec's Tempre" heated quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensor system for device layer self-regeneration in continuously-run OLED production.

Colnatec Tempe sensor system

Colnatec explains that measuring the thickness of an OLED layer (often on the order of nanometers) is a direct function of the temperature of the sensor and substrate being coated. If you do not monitor and equalize the temperature, the thickness accuracy will suffer which can lead to inconsistencies as great as 50% per layer. The Tempe system can extend sensor lifetime and improve cost efficiency in long, continuous runs.

In May 2013, Ignis Innovation announced that it will soon start shipping sample 20" AMOLED displays to display makers to evaluation their MaxLife compensation technology. Today Ignis announced that they decided to go for a larger 55" FHD OLED TV. The company said it received "firm orders" for those samples from display manufacturers and OEMs.

The MaxLife external compensation technology continuously measures every pixel in the display and compensates for even the smallest shift in performance (due to burn-in or bad manufacturing issues), making it completely uniform and completely stable. MaxLife can work with a-Si, LTPS and metal-oxide backplanes (those 55" panels now in production use a metal-oxide backplane). The technology should, according to Ignis, allow for cheaper OLED TVs as it improves yield and also enables simpler device (i.e. a simpler pixel structure with less TFTs per pixel).

Pioneer developed new flexible PMOLED panels. Those monochrome panels are bendable (curvature radius : 20mm) and very slim (0.15 mm thick) and light (0.04 g/cm²). Those flexible OLEDs use an ultra-thin glass substrate:

Pioneer wouldn't reveal any more details (such as when they expect to start producing such panels). But if you look at the text on the display, it seems that Pioneer expects to finish development by next year.

Corning announced today that it has been collaborating with AUO on high-performance displays, and AUO's new 5" HD720 AMOLED panels shown at Touch Taiwan use Corning's Lotus Glass. As far as I understand, they are using Corning's latest generation Lotus Glass XT.

AUO says they selected the Lotus Glass platform because of the glass substrate's outstanding thermal and dimensional stability, which facilitates efficient panel manufacturing during rigorous, high-temperature processing.

AU Optronics announced today that it will show new 4.3" flexible AMOLED panels at the Touch Taiwan 2013 conference next week (August 28-30). The new flexible panels are thinner than AUO's previous prototypes at 0.2 mm (vs 0.3 mm before). This is far thinner than LGD's thinnest LCD display announced last week (1.21 mm). AUO's panels use a plastic substrate and thin film encapsulation.

AUO flexible OLED prototype (2011)

AUO will only showcase the company's 5" Full-HD AMOLED panels unveiled earlier in 2013. These panels features the world's highest resolution density at 443 ppi. The company will also show new panels which are 5" 720p (i.e. lower resolution than the FHD ones but at the same size). AUO refers to these as HD720 AMOLED.

The EU-funded ManuCloud (distributed Cloud product specification and supply chain manufacturing execution infrastructure) project was successfully completed, and the partners (Fraunhofer COMEDD, Heliatek, Tridonic Dresden and others) presented a demonstrator of a "facade module" which includes OLED lighting and OPV panels. The ManuCloud project envisions a cloud-like architecture concept, providing users with the ability to utilize the manufacturing capabilities of configurable, virtualized production networks.

The objective of the ManuCloud project was the development of a service-oriented IT environment as basis for the next level of manufacturing networks by enabling production-related inter-enterprise integration down to shop floor level. The EU considers the transition from mass production to personalized, customer-oriented and eco-efficient manufacturing to be a promising approach that may improve and secure the competitiveness of the European manufacturing industries.

Researchers from Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University developed a candlelight-style OLED lighting panel - with a low (1900K) color temperature. To create this device they used four organic electrophosphorescent dyes (red, yellow, green, and sky-blue) that create two emissive layers (blue and orange).

The researchers explain that high color temperature can drastically suppress the generation of melatonin (MLT), a naturally occurring hormone (normally produced at night) that is important for the regulation of the body's circadian rhythms. They say that medical experts have called for the development of new lighting sources with low color temperatures, free of blue emission. Currently no electrical lighting device exists with a color temperature below 2000K. The lowest color temperature is around 2500K for incandescent bulbs. A candle has a temperature of 1910K at its brightest spot.

Researchers at the Human Media Lab at Canada's Queen's University developed a new panoramic compound camera that uses a flexible OLED viewfinder with an array of lenses at the back. The camera array optical characteristics are changed when the camera is flexed. Special software stitches the final image from all the lenses dynamically. Pretty cool:

The researchers say that the prototype "envisions the use of photographs as cameras in one aggregate flexible, thin-film device". The video seems to have been filmed back in 2012 but they released it just a few days ago.