Technical / Research - Page 95

OSRAM are announcing new advances in their transparent OLED lighting panels. They have developed a large (17x17 cm2, with a 210cm2 luminous area) transparent OLED, which is only a few hundred micrometers thick. The samples have been developed as part of the TOPAS project (scheduled to produce a 1 meter-square OLED module by 2011).

OSRAM says that there is a "clear demand" for large, low-profile transparent light sources.

Samsung released a new video showing a flexible OLED prototype. The display on show is a 2.8" panel featuring 166 ppi. The whole panel is just 20 micrometer thick - and apparently it is shatterproof, as can be seen in this video:

Zumbotel Group from Austria and the Fraunhofer IPMS institute has agreed to create a new joint-venture for the development and production of OLED lighting modules. The new company will be called Ledon OLED Lighting. It will be based in Dresden, and will have 10-15 employees in the first year.

Large Area OLED lighting panel,Fraunhofer

Ledon will not only produce OLED panels, but will also develop and manufacture complete OLED lighting solutions and concepts for large-scale OLED systems. Ledon will use the Fraunhofer's pilot line, to make OLED panels on 370x470 mm2 substrates with a cycle time of just three minutes. 

Back in January 2009 we have interviewed Prof. karl Leo from the Fruanhofer IPMS, and he explains their technology and aims.

Productronica (an international trade fair for innovative electronics production) has released a couple of new free white-papers. One of them is titled "The promise of organic electronics". It includes a special focus on OLED displays and can be downloaded here.

Universal Display Corporation say they have been awarded  two new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I $100,000 programs for OLED lighting from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE):

• In the first project, UDC will demonstrate a very high-efficiency white PHOLED lighting device. Universal Display’s goal is to demonstrate further gains in power efficiency, exceeding its prior research milestone of 102 lumens per watt.
• In the second project, UDC will demonstrate a white PHOLED using the company’s novel OLED permeation barrier technology. The Company, working with Princeton University, recently demonstrated a material system that forms an ultra-hermetic, flexible and transparent environmental barrier for OLEDs. This may provide a cost-effective packaging solution for high-volume, low-cost manufacture of white OLED lighting devices.

Mitsubishi Electric is showing a new flexible OLED display (they call it the Diamond-Vision OLED) which is a modular display made from small OLED panels. Each panel is one 'pixel', and together they can be made into a large high-res image. There's no limit to the size of this display - it can be used to cover buildings, trains, or even 'entire-cities' like Mitsubishi says...

Mitsubishi 155-inch Diamond-Vision OLED TV

They are now demonstrating a 155" Diamond-Vision OLED TV prototype. Each pixel pitch is 3mm, which means that you have to watch the TV from about 2 meters away. 

Mitsubishi thinks that this screen is better than large LED displays used in sports stadiums and other places, because of the better resolution that can be achieved. The lifetime is said to be 20,000 hours. No word yet on pricing or availability.

Note - the OLEDs themselves are not 'flexible', but the display can be curved because it is made from individual OLED panels...

Mitsubishi entered the OLED market back in 2007.

The HYPOLED project (High-Performance OLED-Microdisplays for Mobile Multimedia HMD and Projection Applications) is now in month 18, and they present some intermediate results:

• A new all-digital VGA full-color OLED microdisplay backplane has been designed by Fraunhofer IPMS in a 0.18 micrometer commercial CMOS process and is currently under prototype manufacturing.
• Pico-projector optics (matching HYPOLED VGA microdisplay) has been developed by Fraunhofer IOF and publicly demonstrated.
• The MediaBox connectivity to DVB-T, DVB-H (MPEG-2/4 streaming) and WiFi has been implemented by Fraunhofer IPMS on a low-power multimedia processor platform (Samsung S3C6400) and has been demonstrated.

HYPOLED was originally founded and co-ordinated by MicroEmissive Displays (MED) and the Fraunhofer IPMS. But MED has entered administration, and now they are collaborating with MicroOLED, who joined the team in March 2009. The collaboration targets benchmarking of MicroOLED's existing WVGA and Fraunhofer IPMS' HYPOLED VGA backplane, each in combination with both MicroOLED's and Fraunhofer IPMS' pin OLED stacks.

MIT professor Vladimir Bulovic explains how OLEDs work, and uses a pickle as a giant OLED pixel...

A couple of month ago, the Fraunhofer institute has shown their interactive data eyeglasses. These glasses include an OLED microdisplay on a CMOS chip that also includes an eye tracker. They now say that such devices could be ready within 2 years.

More information on the OLED device can be found here. Basically, the idea is a bi-directional OLED - which is a display and a camera in one chip. They put photo-diodes between the OLED pixels.

A few weeks ago, the CombOLED project (together with CEA-LETI, a French research laboratory) has announced a new efficient transparent white OLED. They have sent us a short video clip now of this display:

This is a Small-Molecule OLED, with a 5x5 cm2 active emitting area, which is deposited using thermal evaporation and encapsulated using ultra-thin layers. It's about 65%-70% transparent. More information on this panel can be found here.

Hopefully we'll be able to bring more information from CombOLED soon.