Sumitomo Chemical has developed a new 6.5" AMOLED panel. It's a polymer-based OLED made by printing technology, sealed by a metal plate. It was made by Sumitomo's "Device Development Center," which was established in August 2009.
Novaled is showing a new white top-emitting OLED, that has over 50,000h lifetime and 30lm/W power efficiency (at an initial luminance of 1,000 cd/m2). The OLED is produced on a metal substrate. Novaled has developed a high performance white top emitting OLED using the Novaled PIN OLED® technology with its proprietary doping and host materials in association with a blue fluorescent emitting material from SFC Korea.
The device has an ITO-free top contact and corporates a Novaled-specific light extraction material layer to enhance the efficiency. At the same time this outcoupling material reduces the color shift over a wide viewing angle so that it can hardly be detected by the naked eye.
Kim Hyo Wook, a Korean Patent Office’s assessment team examiner has made a presentation for "Patent trend of OLED and Patent Office's Intellectual Property Support Program". OLEDNet has posted a summary of this presentation.
According to Kim's presentation, the key fields of technology development is Large Size and Long Life. Large Size technologies are being developing by laser and inkjet panel manufacturing companies with evaporating deposition system while Long Life technologies are being developing by cover packaging material makers and organic material makers.
More SID news: 3M will present OLED light extraction technology, providing significant efficiency improvements for OLED light sources and allowing for as much as a 100% increase in axial luminance.
3M will also show their Flexible Transparent Barrier (FTB) film, which provides water vapor resistance to protect OLED (or e-paper) displays, will also be showcased.
The Fraunhofer is going to show advances in OLED microdisplays at the 2010 Society for Information Display (SID) exhibition. The first is advances in their data-glasses, first shown back in 2009. These are using Bidirectional Microdisplays - an element that displays an image and acts as a camera at the same time by interleaving display pixels and photo detectors in a mosaic style. They are actually going to show a fully functional demonstrator. The integrated camera looks at the eye and records any change in the position of the eyeball. A subsequent image processing can distinguish between unconscious movements and the ones the user does by intent. The overall system can modify the content that is shown on the display according to the eye movements - and you get Augmented Reality.
Universal Display is going to present a number of advances in their phosphorescent OLED technologies and materials at the 2010 Society for Information Display (SID) exhibition. They will also show new prototypes and product concepts.
A major highlight will be a new light-blue UniversalPHOLED emitter system. The company has used this system to demonstrate significant performance gains in a commercial-sized white OLED lighting panel that can begin to address initial white lighting applications. It also plays a key role in the company’s demonstration of a new four sub-pixel display design with the potential to accelerate commercial introduction of all-phosphorescent AMOLEDs with enhanced energy efficiency and extended lifetime.
OLEDNet has posted an interesting article talking about OLED production yields in evaporating deposition equipments. They say that current TFT-LCD production processes take around a minute to complete, while AMOLED processes take around 4 minutes. Both Samsung and LG are developing new ways to make this faster (Samsung is developing a vertical evaporating deposition system, while LG is working on a horizontal one). But even those new methods will still take around 2 minutes.
White-OLED panel, FraunhoferOLEDNet suggests using a white OLED with a color filter. White OLED can reduce the evaporating deposition time to one minute in In-line evaporating deposition method because it could produce the light emitting floor using RGB and other parts in only one sheet of shadow mask.
There are two major problems with this approach. First of all, white AMOLED materials aren't ready for this yet (but they will be soon). Second, you lose color quality. But OLEDNet claims that such displays will still be better than TFT-LCDs in terms of contrast. OLEDNet concludes that developing white OLED materials should be the core technology for the future of AMOLED displays.
PolyPhotonix says they'll launch a general lighting 8" OLED tile in early 2011 with a 60-lumen per watt efficiency. We still have to see whether they'll manage to do this, but if they do than these panels will be larger than anything available today, and also more efficient (OSRAM's ORBEOS are currently 25lm/W and Philips Lumiblade are 'above 20lm/W' - although we can assume that by 2011 they'll have better efficiency for their panels also).
PolyPhotonix is working toward polymer-based OLED Lighting panels.
Philips is offering a new OLED lamp (using their Lumiblade OLED panels) for sale, called The Edge. It was developed in collaboration with Established & Sons (Amanda Levete). According to Philips: "The EDGE is a flat ribbon of steel twisted into a self-supporting form. A groove is then cut into the steel, off center, to allow the cable to be expressed and to exaggerate the movement of the piece. With this project, Amanda Levete has succeeded in revealing the wafer-thin essence of OLEDs and creating a light that is completely reductive in its simplicity".
The EDGE OLED lamp
Philips will also start to sell another OLED lamp soon, The O'Leaf. This one was developed in collaboration with Modular Lighting Instruments. In O'Leaf, the form of the fixture is based on the organic shapes. It can be used as a table-lamp (shown below) or fixed on the wall.
Philips O Leaf OLED lamp
The Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University announced that Sunic System has become an industry partner in the center. The FDC, together with Sunic, will develop flexible OLED displays. The FDC has purchased a Gen-II OLED SUNICEL Plus 400 vacuum evaporation and encapsulation process tool from Sunic for its Tempe development facility.The tool will be installed in the fall (2010), with first devices anticipated in 1Q 2011.
The SUNICEL Plus system is designed to simplify OLED technology development and manufacturing, and is equipped to handle plastic substrates without interrupting the vacuum process. The system enables full color AMOLED and mono-color panel production with high electro luminescence (EL) performance and long lifetime.
