According to a new research by Cintelliq, there's an "explosive growth" in OLED Lighting patents since 2000. 90% of the patents has appeared since 2000. One of the driving factors has been increased government funding. The new study identifies over 1,800 white OLED patents (EP, JP, US, and WO).
Dupont announced new silver conductive inks for printed electronics, which can be used for OLEDs and touch screens. The new screen printable inks include: DuPont 7723, a low temperature firing silver ink suitable for printing on glass, and DuPont
9169, a low temperature curing Ag ink designed for flexible substrates.
The 7723 ink delivers excellent adhesion to Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) coated glass, it is lead-free and solderable, ideal for use in Touch Screen devices. The 9169 has extremely high conductivity, strong adhesion to ITO coated flexible substrates, low contact resistance to ITO, and fine line capability. Both products are recommended where high performance on coated substrates is critical, such as in Touch Screens and OLEDs.
The kind folks over at Osram has sent us one of their new ORBEOS OLED Lighting panel for a review. The ORBEOS is a round (88mm diameter) glass panel that's only 2.1mm thick (it weights 24g). The efficiency is 25lm/W. The brightness of the panels is 1,000cd/m² with power input of less than a watt, and they should last around 5,000 hours. The panels are available now via OSRAM's
site, they cost â¬240 each. The panels were actually released back in November 2009, and OSRAM say that they are happy with the sales and interest so far.
OSRAM ORBEOSRead on to see my impressions of this OLED panel, and how it compares to Philips' Lumiblade panels which were the first available OLED panels...
China's Visionox has won the "2009 Electronics, Electronic Information Science and Technology Award" by the Chinese Institute of Electronics. Visionox are working on hybrid OLEDs (which combine organic and inorganic materials), and has started building China's first OLED mass-production line that will output more than 12 million 1" OLED displays annually. In 2-3 years, Visionox plans to develop 2.4" to 17" AMOLEDs.
Visionox OLED photo frame PrototypeIn October 2009, Visionox has shown us some OLED lighting and displays prototypes.
Update: We have found photos of the new lamps, see below
Last week we reported that Ingo Maurer will soon show two new OLED designs using transparent panels from Novaled, and today we have some more information and photos of the lamps. The lamps will use OLEDs made on glass substrates that are transparent when in the off state.
The first lamp is called Flying Future, which uses 90 "Wing" OLEDs with an active area of 30 cm². The second lamp is "4 x 4 is 34" which includes four "Quadro" (100 cm²) light elements that the user can play with. Here are photos of the lamps, thanks to the anonymous commenter:
Flying Future
India's Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has announced a new $10 million project to develop LED and OLED lighting, with first versions of LEDs expected by March 2012. The LED chips will be packaged with phosphor coating and converted into white LED. The target for luminous efficacy of the LED chip is 25-50 lumens/watt.
After they finish the R&D phases, they plan to transfer the technology to an Indian LED chip maker and LED packaging companies.
Universal Display Corporation has been awarded a $500,000 Phase II contract from
the National Science Foundation (NSF) for its novel thin-film encapsulation technology, focused on flexible OLEDs for lighting and displays. UDC's encapsulation is single-layer, ultra-hermetic, transparent and flexible. It's also environmental friendly, and can also be used for solar cells, batteries and sensors.
CDT say they have produced an ITO-free PLED Lighting device, using a fine copper mesh. They have collaborated with Conductive Inkjet Technology (CIT) in the NOMAD project funded by the UK's government.
ITO is expensive and brittle, and is not so useful for flexible electronics. The new manufacturing method demonstrated in the NOMAD project reduces costs by eliminating ITO along with significantly reducing the capital and processing costs for patterning metal bus bars which distribute current and ensure the uniformity of light emission. CIT’s process eliminates the need for traditional vacuum sputtering equipment and etching tanks.
Researchers from the University of Berkeley found a new way to process
white OLEDs for solid state lighting. They are using Red, Blue and Green Phosphorescent OLED materials that usually suffer from interference between them when trying to create white light. But the researchers used polymer nanoparticles (iridium-based) to house the OLED materials, and these are used as a "do not disturb" sign, isolating guest molecules from one another, and enabling them to emit light without interactions from other colors.
Novaled is set to introduce new ultra-flat and long-life OLED lighting at the Light + Building show in April 11st. The OLEDs on display will range from warm white to clear cold white, and they will also show color OLEDs (orange, red & blue) and color-tunable OLEDs (from light-blue through white to orange), too.
Some of these panels are big - up to 225 cm2. The OLEDs can be transparent or behave like a mirror depending on the substrate material (metal or glass) and device structure.
Yesterday Novaled released a new animation with some beautiful concepts. We'll have to wait for April to see which of these concepts have materialized to prototypes...
