Technical / Research - Page 72

There's an interesting article over at the LATimes about HP's flexible display research. HP has been showing flexible e-paper prototypes for quite a while, and they say they expect to deliver a prototype to the US army by year's end. Carl Taussig, director of advanced display research at HP Labs in Palo Alto, reveals that the company is also working on flexible OLEDs. Flexible E Ink is closer to commercialization - but it is monochrome and not suited for videos, and that's why HP is also looking at OLEDs.

HP's Flexible E Ink display

In October 2010, Universal Display (together with LG and L-3) announced that they delivered 8 flexible wrist-mounted OLED displays for the US Army. These are 4.3" QVGA full-color OLEDs, made on a amorphous-Silicon (a-Si) TFT, fabricated by LG
Display.

Innovacene (a start-up founded in 2010 by a New Hampshire University professor) will collaborate with The New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center (NH-ICC) to commercialize its thin, organic and ultra-lightweight OLED coating technology. Innovacene and NI-ICC received a $100,000 grant from the New Hampshire Innovation Research Center (NHIRC).

Euronews visited Philip's Aachen OLED center and produced a nice short video about Philips OLED Lighting research and commercial Lumiblade panels. This video will be aired on Euronews several times in the following week. It's a nice introduction to OLED Lighting technology and how OLED panels are made today:

The video features Kristin Knappstein, Philips' OLED business chief (we posted an interview with Kristin a few weeks ago) and Dr. Stefan Grabowsky, the OLED100.eu project manager (whom we interviewed in 2009) . You can also see the Mimosa interactive artwork and some nice shots from within Philips' labs.

China's Skyworth Group (makers of CRT and LCD TVs) has set up a new R&D center for OLED displays together with the South China University of Technology (SCUT). The new center will be located in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province, south China.

Fujitec is showing cylindrical (tubular) OLED lighting panels and OLED lighting processing equipment. The OLED panels are either blue, red or green, 70mm diameter and 80mm in length. The luminance is 100cd/m² for red or blue and 1000cd/m² for green - which also features 24lm/W efficacy level. The lifetime is just 100 hours currently.

According to the company by middle 2011 they will be able to produce white-color panels (45mm diameter, 70mm in length) featuring 20lm/W at 1000 hours lifetime. The aim of their current project is to reach a white OLED at 30mm diameter and 200mm length, 30lm/W and 10,000 hours of lifetime.

The US Patent Office published a new patent application from Apple - combining the Magic Mouse touch interface with a flexible OLED or another specialized display surface made of collimated optical glass that contains a unique magnifying capability.

The idea is that the display can be used for all sorts of application - for example displaying a calculator when in use with Apple's Numbers application or magnifying text when using Apple's Pages application. Apple wants to use a flexible display because the mouse's surface is non-planar.

Tera-Barrier Films announced today that Kisco has become a strategic investor in the company, and will be the exclusive distributor of their products. The funds will be used by Tera-Barrier to commercialize their moisture-resistant films for flexible OLEDs and organic solar cells. The company is already providing small-volume samples and expects to start large-scale manufacturing in the 'near future'.

Tera-Barrier says that defects such as pinholes, cracks and grain boundaries are common in thin oxide barrier films when fabricated onto plastic substrates. Current barrier technologies focus on reducing these defects by using alternate organic and inorganic multilayers coated on plastic. These multiple layers stagger corresponding pores in adjacent layers and create a ‘tortuous’ lengthy pathway for water and oxygen molecules, making it more difficult to travel through the plastic.

Update: It turns out that the new manufacturing process that is discussed here is LITI (currently they use FMM). More details here!

We've got some interesting updates about Samsung's upcoming Super AMOLED Plus displays. We know that Samsung said that the new displays feature 50% more sub-pixels, and today we confirmed that Samsung no longer uses Pentile matrix in the new displays - which is great news - they are using regular RBG. Samsung's new manufacturing process allows them to reach over 300ppi - which is comparable to the iPhone 4 "Retina Display" (which features 326ppi).

Samsung Super AMOLED Plus display

The last bit of information is regarding the OLED materials - it turns out that Samsung aren't using a Green Phosphorescent material yet. The Super AMOLED Plus displays (like the first-gen Super AMOLED) use just a Red Phosphorescent with a Green and Blue Fluorescents.

Rohm developed a new (2nd-generation) OLED lighting panel that uses a red phosphorescent material. The new material results in a more efficient device - about
25-30lm/W, up from about 11lm/W in their first-generation all-fluorescent device.

Lumiotec (which is partly owned by Rohm) will start producing these new panels in "volume" within a few days (Lumiotec reported earlier that it will make around 60,000 panels a year). The new panel's size is 145x145mm (the same size of Lumiotec's older panels) and will cost ¥30,000 (about $365) - which is cheaper than Lumiotec's first-gen panels (the whole development kit used to cost The kit costs ¥84,000 - about $930). Lumiotec will also introduce other shapes and sizes. Here's our review of Lumiotec's older OLED Lighting panels.

Universal Display (UDC) was showing a couple of OLED lighting panels at CES. These are the same ones the showed at SID this year (and later UDC designed some nice desk lamps using them):

The panels are 6" in size and only 1/8 inch thick.