Monday, March 24, 2014

The OLED Beat


[It has been six months since we heard from our native OLED booster on progress in that field. Here are a few notable developments from early 2014. — Ed.]


Organic, light-emitting diodes now cost about 20 times as much to manufacture, per kilo-lumen, as traditional LEDs, according to Panasonic's research director. He believes that by 2020 this gap will shrink by a factor of 10, so that OLEDs are only twice as expensive. Below are examples of the kinds of breakthroughs that will enable this evolution.



Konica Minolta -- Mitsubishi have been showing their color-tunable OLEDs with the brand name Velve (pictured). These will be available in either rigid or flexible formats. But the smart money is indicating that both attributes in the same package will increase its marketability. There is limited availability for these iterations till the third quarter of 2014. The artist in me is clamoring for this model.


Kateeva has catalyzed rapid developments in the area of yield jet fabrication, which will optimize high-volume production of OLEDs. They have effectively tweaked the practices in fabrication and can double yields, this year.


Plastronics has been developing a unique inspection technology that can revolutionize how defects in organic light-emitting products (OLEP) are defined or found. The system allows real-time inspection of printed plastic sheets during manufacturing runs, and has the capability of being expanded to roll-to-roll manufacturing. A software upgrade enabled a high degree of automation in real-time analysis of images from microfocus x-ray examination.


Over in Germany, Comedd is doing remarkable work on integration of OLEPs with organic photovoltaics. The takeaway here is in a class of products that share a substrate and are both organic PV units and organic light emitting products. The best of these are 2 millimeters thick, flexible, transparent, and take in energy sunlight and work as lights.


At the CPI (Center for Process innovation) in England, they have been improving their novel backplane idea that is using ultra-flexible active-matrix OLEDS (AMOLEDs) as seen in your phones and tablets. CPI has been working on how tech-savvy OLED types can improve the goods by losing the glass substrate; they accomplished this breakthrough a few months ago now.


Finally, let's glance at what's happening in the wearable subset of lighting and organic displays. This is essentially a new class of product going from a half a billion dollar business this year to $40 billion by 2020. It's likely to grow by billions over the next few quarters. And almost all of these wearables will be using AMOLEDs or organic light-emitting transistors or possibly organic thin film transistors. That's a great deal of expansion in this nascent part of electronics, and wearables are a major factor in OLEDs' ascent. Wearable electronics exemplifies the way these goods are occupying increasingly larger roles in folk's lives, each able to produce light, data, information, and communication.


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