Technical / Research - Page 69

The European OLED100.eu project developed a new OLED lighting panel that is the largest to date: a 33x33cm² panel. The new panel offer 25lm/W at 1000 cd/m² luminance. This relatively good efficiency was achieved using out-coupling and an efficient RGB OLED stack. The panels were fabricated at the Gen-2 line at the Fraunhofer IPMS.

The new panels are based on the on-substrate tiling concept - with 5 segments connected in series. The 33x33cm² panel itself is seamless and so can be tiled to create larger panels. The active area on each panel is 828cm^{2 (}aperture ratio of 76%).

I got word from a CMEL AMOLED user that some displays fail after prolonged exposure to sun. Interestingly, the displays seem to recover if left unpowered for a couple of days (out of the sun, that is). I wonder if any other AMOLED user experienced similar problems? In any case, here's a video they uploaded showing the problematic displays:

The CMEL module used by this company is a C0283QGLC-T. This is a 2.83" diagonal 240x320 full-color AMOLED. CMEL no longer produces AMOLEDs (after the merger into CMI) - but CMI seems to have an active OLED program that will soon go into production.

Back in 2006, we published an interview with Andy Hannah, Plextronics' president, CEO and co-founder. Andy agreed to do a follow-up interview to update us on Plextronics' business and technology.

Plextronics is a US-based company (established in 2002, as a spin-out from Carnegie Mellon University) that is developing technology that enables broad market commercialization of organic electronic devices - including OLEDs, plastic chips, polymer solar cells and organic sensors.

Q: Andy, can you give us a short introduction to your OLED technology?

Q: The benefits of OLEDs include, of course, being printable, low cost and demonstrating enhanced device performance. Plextronics’ technology plays a key part in achieving these benefits by reducing operating voltage in devices and thereby increasing lifetime and power efficiency.

SemiQuartz Wafer announces new glass substrates that are suited for OLED production. The company says that these new substrate are better than what's currently on the market: total thickness variation is less than 2 micrometers and the roughness is less than .3 nanometers. The new substrates are now available.

A low thickness variation is important as any variations can lead to color shifts, non-uniform brightness and even short-circuit of an individual pixel which could hard the OLED lifetime. Studies conducted by SemiQuarz Wafer revealed OLED malfunctions when the substrate’s permeation rate exceeded 1 x 10-6 g/m² per day 25 degrees Celsius. In addition, the substrate must also meet specific requirements in terms of chemical resistance, temperature stability and moisture sensitivity.

Researchers from the University of Michigan developed an efficient fluorescent blue OLED. The ceiling for the efficiency of such OLEDs was believe to be around 5%, and the new OLEDs are close to 10%. The new material is a computer-simulations assisted redesign of a current material used by the University collaborators in Singapore.

Fluxim released version 3.2 of their SETFOS simulation software, used to study OLED and organic solar cells (OPVs). The new version includes several new improvements for OLED simulation:

• An enhanced nonlinear least-square fitting algorithm for general parameter extraction tasks, providing quantitative information about the quality of the fits:correlation coefficients for the fit parameters, confidence ellipses and intervals.
• An improved steady-state solver for the charge drift-diffusion equations, capable of simulating extended density of states for free and trapped carriers in multiple layers.
• A seamless coupling of electrons, excitons and photons in a single, comprehensive simulation software, taking into account the influence of the optical environment on the exciton dynamics.

Yesterday we posted Ecosummit TV's video interview with Novaled's co-founder and chief scientist, and today we found another great interview, this time with Harry Boehme, Novaled's CFO. Harry confirms that the company had €11.2 million in revenues in 2010. He also reveals that Novaled are selling materials to a large OLED display maker in Asia - which is Samsung (while not saying this specifically due to NDA, harry admits that they are selling to the 'only AMOLED maker').

Harry also discusses Novaled's technology and markets (they target OLED displays, OLED lighting and organic PV) and estimates that OLEDs will have a 20% share in the flat-panel display market within 5 years. The interview also includes a short visit to Novaled's chemistry lab with with Dr. Mike Zoellner, a project leader.

Japan's OLED lighting fair started in March 8th, and we got some interesting OLED Lighting news. NEC lighting is showing several OLED lighting lamps using their upcoming panels - which will be 10x10cm ones offering 60lm/W efficiency - which is actually very good. The company plans to commercialize them in fiscal 2011 (which ends of March 2012). NEC is using UDC's PHOLED materials, which explains the relativly high efficiency.

NEC OLED lighting

Panasonic Electric Works is another company that's developing OLED lighting panels based on UDC's materials, and now we hear that they too plan to commercialize their panels in 2011. We don't have any technical details on those panels yet.

Update: Here's another interview with Novaled's CFO, in which he confirms the €11 million 2010 revenue figure, and also reveals that their customer is Samsung.

Ecosummit TV posted a nice interview with Dr. Jan Blochwitz-Nimoth, Novaled's co-founder and chief scientist. Jan discusses the company's business, technology, OLED doping and other interesting topics.

In the video description in YouTube they say that Novaled had €11 million in revenues in 2010. The company reported around $8 million in revenue in 2008, so this makes sense. We posted our own interview with Gerd Guenther, Novaled's marketing chief a couple of months ago.

Three weeks ago we announced that Polymertronics have a new flexible OLED science kit, and they offer £20 discount for OLED-Info readers. This offer lasts till March 15th, so there's still one week left to enjoy it. To claim the discount simply mention OLED-Info when you place your order.