Technical / Research - Page 61

Universal Display announced that they have been awarded a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project to demonstrate further gains the performance of large-area phosphorescent based OLED lighting panels through enhanced thermal management techniques. The DOE awarded $1 million (or $999,963, to be exact) to UDC. This is a follow up to the SBIR Phase I project awarded in June 2010.

While OLEDs generate low heat, and UDC's PHOLED technology and materials generate even less heat, using thermal management techniques can still lower operating temperature and extend the OLED's lifetime.

The Fraunhofer IPMS are developing a roll-to-roll process to make flexible large area OLED lighting panels. Next week they will show a 30cm wide flexible OLED lighting panel on a metal foil, fabricated at COMEDD. In fact they say that this demonstrates that they developed all necessary process steps for a complete production of flexible OLEDs in a roll-to-roll tool: from the structuring of substrate up to the lamination of barrier foils.

Update: according to new reports, the OLED-A was wrong and Samsung are still using a Shadow-Mask to fabricate Super AMOLED HD displays

The OLED Association published a very interesting paper discussing Samsung's and LG Display's efforts to scale OLED production to large size panels (specifically 55" OLED TVs). In the article, they say that Samsung will use an LTPS substrate with a SMS (Small Mask Scanning) method, while LGD plans to use an Oxide TFT and Kodak's White OLED with color filters architecture. We already reported about Samsung's SMS method a few weeks ago.

The article includes a very interesting comparison of the different deposition methods (FMM, LITI, SMS, Printing and LG's RGBW). They also claim that the new display in the Samsung Galaxy II LTE HD was produced using LITI.

The European Union launched a new initiative called OLAE+. They offer €18 million in collaborative R&D funding in the area of Organic & Large Area Electronics. OLEA+ is a competition that is open for participants from Austria, Catalonia, Flanders, Germany, Israel, Poland, Sweden and the UK, and first proposals must be submitted by January 31st 2012.

Possible applications for OLAE are rollable/flexible displays, large area efficient lighting, low cost solar cells, low-cost RFIDs and memories, flexible and environmental friendly batteries and more.

IMOLA (Intelligent light management for OLED on foil applications) is a new EU-funded (€5.1 million) project that aims to realize large-area OLED lighting modules with built-in intelligent light management. The idea is that light intensity can be adjusted uniformly or locally according to the time of day or a person's position - and applications include wall, ceiling and in-vehicle (dome) lighting.

IMOLA's OLED lighting module will consists of OLED tiles on a flexible backplane foil. Each tile can be individually controlled via the backplane. The intelligent part comes from a smart-power thin chip, advanced communication features and optical feedback.

HP has developed a new method to produce large AMOLED panels, based on roll-to-roll manufacturing. They say that one of the biggest challenges to make flexible OLEDs is the alignment on large area flexible substrates. The new solution uses self-aligned imprint lithography (SAIL) to laminate a well-defined micro OLED (µOLED) frontplane unto a flexible active matrix amorphous silicon TFT backplane.

SAIL process flow

HP says they already built a proof-of-concept AMOLED device - which contains a flexible µOLED frontplane with OLED sizes of 50 µm on PET and active matrix backplane on polyimide with pixel pitches of 1 mm. The company claims that the new method will enable large area OLEDs at a very low cost.

nTact has joined the Holst Centre partner network. The two companies will jointly develop technologies to enable patterned deposition of homogeneous film layers on flexible foils. nTact's Selective Area Coating technology will hopefully be fast enough to be used in a roll-to-roll process using low-viscosity inks.

The Holst center says that this research program will be a necessary step towards large-volume manufacturing of OPV and OLED lighting devices on flexible substrates.

Korea Investment & Securities produced an interesting investment report about the Korean and Taiwanese AMOLED industry. They focus on material and equipment suppliers. Basically they say that large OLED panels will be produced soon (by 2013 or 2014 at the latest) by both Samsung and LG, and they try to identify which companies will benefit from this OLED market expansion. They say that both LG and Samsung will eventually convert their lines to Oxide-TFTs.

Strangely they do not even mention Universal Display and Novaled - which are both major material suppliers to Samsung and LG - even though they do list a lot of "foreign" material suppliers such as Dow Chemical, Idemitsu Kosan, Merck and even Kodak (which is no longer into OLEDs...). In their analysis for Duksan, for example, they do not mention the fact that the green material is now supplied by Universal - which should reduce the company's revenue from OLEDs... So we do not vouch for this report...

There's an interesting report that both Samsung and LG have recently produced prototype 55" OLED TV panels. These panels will be unveiled in the FPD International 2011 exhibition in Japan next month.

According to the report, Samsung has produced the 55" panel in their 5.5-Gen line using Small Mask Scanning technology (SMS, which replaces Fine Metal Mask, or FMM). As was previously reported, LG is using white OLED with color filters to produce their large panels. Both companies are satisfied with the panels' quality, power consumption and lifetime.

Germany's Fraunhofer institute has been touting their bi-directional OLED microdisplays for quite some time, and now they are showing a new version that doubles as a dimensional sensor. To create a bi-directional display, Fraunhofer placed photodiodes between the OLED pixels. These microdisplays can be used as dimensional sensorics for surface characterization (distance or inclination sensors).

"By inverse-confocal imaging approach a point-source sensor with purely electronic scanning allows extremely compact sensor modules", explains Constanze Grossmann from Fraunhofer IOF. "This opens completely new opportunities for machine integration."