Technical / Research - Page 89

Samsung Mobile Display's president of engineering Brian Berkeley said yesterday that Samsung is accelerating its development of OLED displays, including increasing the size and volume to enable rollout of OLED TVs. Samsung has been critical of OLED TVs in the past years, but things are changing: there's high volume AMOLED production, with millions of OLED displays for mobile devices shipping each month.

Samsung 30-inch 3D OLED TV prototype

Samsung are now making huge investments in OLEDs, including development of medium to large sized panels. They are actually working on how to scale a Gen 4 sized plants (like they have today) to a Gen 7 or even a Gen 8, which will be able to make TV panels economically. This will require either much more powerful lasers working much more quickly than today's process for creating the backplane on which they deposit the OLEDs, or some alternative technology. There are also issues in color patterning, for which Samsung thinks it has a new unique solution, and OLED printing.

Berkeley predicts that a 40" OLED TV will use only 10 watts in about five years (compared to 40 watts today for a 40" LCD). He also said that the technology will be great for 3D TVs (image switching is quicker and so left and right images are completely separated).

Merck are working toward solution-processable OLED materials, and are now saying that they expect to have a green material that is comparable to vacuum processable green within 9 months. Merck's materials will be suited for large-area panels such as OLED TV panels.  

Merck's OLED material development started in 2005 when they bought Covion. They say that the NEMO project (started in 2009) was a real boost to the performance of their materials.

The OLED100.eu project has won the Best Energy Efficient project award in Europe's ICT (International Telecommunication Union) competition. They actually won it together with Beywatch (tools for environmental management and energy efficiency). Both project will get €10,000 (there were 39 candidates altogether). OLED100.eu have also send us a new photo of a large-area OLED panel (by Philips Research):

Large Area OLED Lighting

OLED100.eu is an integrated European research project to accelerate the development of OLED Lighting technologies. It received €12.5 million funding and focuses on five main goals:

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  High power efficacy (100 lm/W)
  


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  Long lifetime (100.000 h)
  


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  Large area (100x100 cm2)
  


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  Low-cost (100 Euro/m2)
  


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  Measurement standardization / application research
  

A few days ago we posted about DisplayMate's Nexus-One display tests. Basically they are very unhappy with the OLED's performance, especially when compared to the iPhone's LCD.

Now Barry Young from the OLED-Association has sent us his response to these tests:

Last week, there was an incredible amount of Internet chatter, generated by one well-regarded tester (DisplayMate) and one blogger (DisplayBlog) comparing the AMOLED display in the Nexus I with the LTPS LCD in the iPhone. In short, according to the tester, the AMOLED didn’t measure up. The evaluation was, to my knowledge, the first in-depth scientific comparison of the two displays. Did they help or just confuse the situation? There was a time when display architectures and the measurements of performance were relatively simple:

The DisplayBlog and DisplayMate are working on an interesting series of tests for Google's Nexus One phone AMOLED display and the iPhone's 3GS display. It's not finished yet, but they have posted the first tests of the AMOLED display. There's a lot of technical information, but here are the main conclusions:

• The OLED is 800x480, but uses PenTile technology, that has two-thirds of the total number of sub-pixels found on an 800x480 LCD, so it won’t be quite as sharp as a typical 800x480 display.
• The display has only 16-bits color depth, with just 32 or 64 intensity levels. DisplayMate say this is unacceptable for a high performance phone such as the Nexus One. The colors are coarse and inaccurate as a result. 
• The display is excellent for text, icons and menu graphics, but poor for image and awful for resolution scaling. The problem with resolution scaling lies in the Android OS which uses a "laughably primitive scaling algorithm".
• The peak white brightness is just 229 cd/m2 which is rather poor.
• The black brightness is outstanding (0.0035 cd/m2) - so dark it is hard to measure or even detect.
• The contrast ratio (65416) is great, the highest they have measured for a production display.
• The screen reflectance is relatively high and washes out the image, makes it hard to view in bright conditions. 
• The phone uses Dynamic Color and Dynamic Contrast which results is exaggerated colors and stretching of images.

3D-Micromac AG has developed and introduced a new laser structuring process for OLED thin film layers. Based on the microSTRUCT workstations a laser system was developed in the mayor field for selective structuring application of anode layers. Hereby the nearly transparent semiconductor tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) is used as anode material.

3D-Micromac says that the integration of an ultra short pulsed laser in microSTRUCT
guarantees a gentle structuring of anode without material damage at substrate level. Special highlight is the processing of variable and scalable substrate sizes. It is realized by an innovative software controlled scanner machining concept achieving a structuring speed of up to 1 meter per second. In addition further layers of OLED can be machined with the same laser system. For instance there is a possibility to repair short circuits and remove other defects in the layer system of the OLED. The laser system can also be used engrave the glass substrate. Marking can be done at the surface of the substrate and also as intra glass marking. The nearly athermal laser machining allows a micro marking of glass without micro cracks in the substrate.

Korea's Modistech is working on flexible OLED Lighting for indirect applications for quite some time, and are now planning to commercialize the technology in 2010. They will produce 150x150mm flexible OLED panels. Back in 2009, Modistech said they plan to do so in 2011, so apparently they are ahead of schedule.

Modistech's slogan for the displays is 'paper-like, fabric-like and film-like'. They say that they will change the paradigm of lighting from 'to install' to 'to attach'. They want to use OLEDs as indirect lighting which does not require high luminance, and is suitable for the flexible OLEDs. It can be used in furniture, kitchenware, airplanes and especially automobiles (make up light, glove box light, foot light and trunk light).

Modistech say that their technology minimizes the number of substrate processes and is using roll-to-roll deposition and self-developed encapsulation material. They claim that they reduce the manufacturing cost by up to 90%!.

DuPont are working on a new OLED (and CIGS solar cells) barrier technology that uses thin layers of ceramic and polymer materials instead of glass. They hope that they'll be able to demo a tool in 2010. Commercialization is expected within a few years.

DuPont says that the new barrier will be cheaper than glass, weight less, and be flexible. DuPont is working under a DOE grant.

A few weeks ago we reported that Lumiotec will start selling OLED Lighting panel dev kits, and today they have indeed opened their online store. The store only accepts Japanese orders currently. 

The development kits (pictured above) include one 145mm x 145mm OLED panel, a controller and an AC adapter. They cost ¥84,000 each (about $930) a little higher than what they said a couple of weeks ago.

The panel is 4.1mm thick (the thickest part is 4.8mm). The light emitting area is 125mm x 125mm. It weights 195g, the average color rendering index is Ra80, and the maximum brightness is  4,000 cd / m². The lifetime is quoted at 30,000 hours (at 1,000 cd / m² brightness level)

Back in September we reported about Kateeva, a new startup that developed a method for printing OLEDs. Now we hear that the company is testing a prototype printer that can print displays sized 1.8x1.5 meters. Kateeva's CEO says that they are in talks with 'leading display makers' to test the printer and inks in 2011.