Technical / Research - Page 82

Universal Display announced that they have been awarded a new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I $99,900 program from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). During this program, the Company will study the potential to enhance the performance of white PHOLED lighting devices in order to meet DOE requirements for general illumination applications.

Under a program titled Thermal Management of High-Efficacy White Phosphorescent Organic Light Emitting Devices, Universal Display will design and build white PHOLED lighting panels to evaluate the impact of operating temperature on performance.

Liquidware (an open-source electronics firm) has released a kit that can be used to make a linux tablet with a 4.3" (480x272) OLED touch display. The kit includes a BeagelBoard Rev C4 board (with a 720Mhz ARM Cortex-A8 OMAP CPU), 20mm speaker, SD slot (it comes with a 4GB card), Wi-Fi, mini USB port and a battery.

So you won't get a real tablet - it's very thick, and not very pretty - but you can play videos and access the web. And it costs just $393. Here's a short video on the kit:

We have some more information and a nice video about AUO's 2.4" transparent touch AMOLED display. The resolution of the panel is 240x320, and it's a "dual-emission" structure. It's got 45% transparency, 200 cd/m2 brightness on the bottom, and 100 cd/m² on the top. The contrast is better than 20,000:1. The response time is less than 0.01ms. AUO hopes to have this as an actual product in 2011, and are also working on a 7" version.

The Holst Center has developed and produced a new flexible OLED that will be used on the back-side of a racecar rear-view mirror. This the first application of a "flexible OLED on foil", according to Holst. They have used Holst's encapsulation technology and Araldite composite materials of Huntsman Advanced Materials. In fact the OLED itself displays the logo Araldite. The OLED is a white "signage device" - it cannot change the display, and the logo is constructed by patterned deposition of light emitting polymer.

The car is the ORECA01 car from French racing team Oreca and they will will be using the mirror in the 24 hours Le Mans race (June 12-13). 12 hour of this race is in the dark, and people will be able to see the writing...

Micro Technology developed a new glass that is ultra thin (only 20um). It can be used as a substrate for flexible displays. The company made an OLED panel made using this new technology. They plan to offer this technology to FPD makers in the "near future".

Remember the Dupont employee that tried to steal OLED technology trade secrets and give them to Peking University in Beijing? He is named Hong Meng, and he pleaded guilty on Tuesday. Meng is facing up to 10 years in prison.

AUO has developed a new 2.4" transparent AMOLED that has an in-cell touch panel - they say it's the world's first. They target it for GPS applications mainly (where users could capture their actual locations for the navigation system to recognize, and make use of the convenient touchscreen interface to find their ways easily). AUO will show this new display at Display Taiwan 2010.

It's interesting to see how AUO's in-cell touch panel compares to Samsung's Super-AMOLED (which also has a touch-panel, but is not transparent).

Today we learned that Visionox's AMOLED pilot production line was completed, and is able to produce OLED displays up to 17", although Visionox will start will 3" to 12" products, and will only start 17" products later. The line was developed in cooperation with the Kunshan Industrial Technology Research Institute (K-ITRI).

Visionox AMOLED production line

Visionox has been cooperating with AU Optronics on a 2.4" AMOLED display product.

LG has developed a new 15" WOLED display. In this display, RGB is achieved by using a white AMOLED pixel with a color filter. The resolution is 1366x768, the brightness is 200 nits (peak:450nits), color gamut 100% and the contrast is 100,000:1.

Sony has developed a Top-Emission 11.7-inch 960 x 540 OLED panel using oxide semiconductor TFTs as its driver elements. Sony says that the new panel has a lifetime of over 10 years and better colors than the XEL-1. The OLED panel features a peak brightness of 600cd/m² or more, a contrast ratio of 1,000,000: 1 or more, and 100% or higher color gamut vs NTSC.

The panel improvements were achieved by reducing the property degradation of the oxide semiconductor TFT. Sony made the following three improvements. First, the company prevents the oxidation of the electrode by changing the structure of the source/drain electrode from the commonly-used Ti/Al/Ti three-layer structure to Ti/Al/Mo structure (Mo is in contact with the amorphous IGZO).