Technical / Research - Page 74

Air Products announced that they have been selected to supply gaseous nitrogen, oxygen and argon to Samsung Mobile Display's (SMD) upcoming Gen-5.5 AMOLED plant plant in Tanjeong, Korea. Air Products will build a new air separation unit (ASU) and pipeline at its Tanjeong site for gases supply to SMD. Air Products is also supplying gases to SMD's two TFT-LCD plants in Cheonan.

Samsung 5.5-Gen AMOLED plant is scheduled to start production in July 2011. This should increase Samsung's AMOLED panel capacity tenfold...

Researchers from the UK and Switzerland have shown that a magnetically polarized current can be manipulated by electric fields. This is the first time that it was shown how you can proactively control spin with electric fields and could pave the way towards combining memory and processing power on the same chip.

The interesting part is that this discovery has been made with flexible organic semiconductors, and so could offer a step-change in the power efficiency and weight of devices based on such materials, including of course OLED displays.

Remember Samsung's beautiful flexible AMOLED display shown at FPD-2010 a few weeks ago? Samsung claims that they will commercialize this technology by 2013-2014, apparently to create 'rollable TVs'. Here's Kim Seong-Cheol, a senior manager over at SMD showing the 0.2mm thick display (although they say they can make 0.1mm thick ones):

Samsung are also working on touch-enabled paper-like displays that will be used for newspapers, and will be commercialized by 2015 (not sure if that's an OLED or an e-paper) and also on transparent displays.

Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) has published their 2011-2015 business plan. Their R&D strategy includes four priority items, one of them being OLED Lighting. Their plan is to produce 80lm/W 40,000 hours white OLEDs in 2015. They say that the cost will be ¥4 per lm - which means $3.8 for the 80lm/W device - but they do not specify the size (area) of those OLEDs.

Back in July 2009 SDK has unveild 30lm/W white OLEDs, which achieved about 40% in light output and featured a lifetime of 10,000 hours. Showa Denko are using a combination of printable phosphorescent polymer and proprietary device structure. They also claim that they already begun shipping sample panels. Here's the relevant slide from their plan presentation:

Applied Nanotech (ANI) is introducing Exclucent: flexible and transparent substrates on PET (polyethylene-terephthalate) that utilize copper-based metallic mesh. Exclucent substrates, which are offered as a replacement for ITO, are currently in volume production and are available to sell (ANI also offers specific application together with customers).

Exclucent offers a sheet resistance lower than 0.1 Ohm/sq., which is tenfold lower than the best ITO coated substrates, according to ANI,  and transparency better than 80% including the transparency of the substrate itself. ANI is currently developing methods to apply its copper ink product Cu-i70 to a variety of transparent substrates as a potential ITO coating replacement.

Jeri Ellsworth, an "American entrepreneur and self-taught computer chip designer", documents her amateur science experiments: and this time she's making OLEDs. Here's a nice video, in which she explains how LEDs and OLEDs works, and later she actually creates an OLED using materials from Polymetronics:

The Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University and AU-Optronics will co-develop mixed oxide thin film transistors (TFTs) for flexible AMOLED displays. AUO and the FDC will work in active partnership with dedicated engineering teams to advance mixed oxide transistor technology and the handling capabilities of conventional flat panel display (FPD) manufacturing processes to accommodate the thin, plastic substrates used for AMOLED flexible displays. Mixed oxide TFTs offer a better ability to drive currents and improve the lifetime and stability of transistors used for OLED displays.

Flexible AMOLED by ITRI

AUO is also working towards flexible displays together with Taiwan's ITRI. AUO plans to start mass producing AMOLED displays in Q2 2011 (but these will not be flexible...).

On the 8th December Polymertronics shall be delivering a free evening lecture at the University of Oxford (in the UK) on OLED technology. This Presentation will describe what OLEDs are, how they work and some of the people that have made the technology possible.

Explained will be some of the challenges in manufacturing and the limitations when making white coloured light. The market will be shown, along some innovative lighting from various companies, plus insight will be given into some of the work being carried out in flexible OLED displays and inkjet printing OLEDs. They will also show working demonstrations of OLEDs.

Samsung Electronics is showing a new 19" OLED TV that was produced using an ink-jet printing method. The resolution is only 960x540 at 58ppi and the luminance is 200cd/m². And it has a 62% color gamut.

Samsung declined to say whether they have plans to commercialize this technology. They only said that it's "still under development".

We've got some more information about AUO's OLED Lighting panels (unveiled at the FPD 2010 exhibition). AUO is showing two panels. The first is a large (245x295mm active size, the module measure 314x333mm) and thin (1.6mm) with 50lm/W efficiency. The color temperature is 3,000K, the luminance is 1500cd/m² and the color rendering index (CRI) is over 80.

The OLED is made from both phosphorescent and fluorescent materials. This probably means that they use phosphorescent Red and Green and fluorescent Blue. Back in 2006, AUO used Universal Display's PHOLED materials for their AMOLED displays, so it's pretty safe to assume that UDC is also providing materials and/or IP for AUO lighting panels.