Institutes join forces for oled production

organic led, oled, roll to roll production The Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Electron Beam and Plasma Technology (FEP) have joined forces to develop process technology for roll to roll production of organic devices.
Fraunhofer has already established the Centre for Organic Materials and Electronic Devices Dresden (COMEDD) and the cooperation of the two Fraunhofer institutes is said to be a ‘significant milestone’ for COMEDD. The roll to roll equipment is located at the Fraunhofer FEP and used by both institutes.




“This plant is among the first types worldwide to develop and produce OLED (organic light-emitting diodes) lighting modules and organic solar cells,” said FEP director Professor Volker Kirchhoff. “This is an important step in the development of industrial scale manufacturing processes and the strategic cooperation enables a perfect combination of the competencies in the field of coating and device technology.”
Professor Karl Leo, director of Fraunhofer IPMS, added: “The new coating plant will enhance Dresden's standing as a cluster location for organic semiconductors and we should see the first oled demonstrators in early 2009.”

Sony ''awfully close'' to selling a 27-inch OLED TV

Sony is currently selling an 11 inch OLED TV (XEL-1) for about $2,500. This TV is more like an expensive executive desk decoration than a home entertainment product. Sony's COO Stan Glasgow said this week at a dinner event in San Francisco that Sony is "awfully close" to selling a 27" OLED TV.

What "awfully close" means in terms of time frames can only be guessed. I assume though that Sony will try to sell a 27 inch OLED TV this holiday shopping season, at least in Japan.

The biggest problem in producing OLED TVs lies in the amount of manual labor needed according to Sony. After the 27 inch OLED Sony plans to offer a 40 inch OLED TV.

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E-paper and OLEDs

LG e-paper



E-paper can also bend like the newest OLED and LCD displays, but is much more energy efficient as it is a bistable (only uses power when changing the image) system that does not require a backlight. Readable in any light regular paper is, e-paper promises to create a new means of accessing information that will challenge traditional paper media. This e-paper display (EPD) from LG Display uses e-ink core tech and LG driver and backplane technology.

e-ink tablet development kit



Here's an e-paper electronic notepad development kit from E-Ink. That means there will be a bunch of devices with e-paper pads just around the corner. This kit contains everything an engineer needs to integrate a daylight-visible bistable rewritable electronic sketch pad into their designs.

UDC OLED




There must have been a rule at the show for every vendor to have at least one flexible (or at least bendy) display at their booth. This prototype media player with curved OLED display was a joint venture between Universal Display and LG Display. Due to their high brightness and contrast, OLED displays will dominate high-performance portable device applications. (That market niche is also very forgiving of OLED's aging issues, as a portable device's lifetime is significantly shorter than a traditional home display product.

samsung pad

As we pointed out, OLED's thin profile, high brightness, color saturation, and contrast make it a very good display for small-form-factor devices and interesting configurations. This OLED notepad concept piece from Samsung SDI had a lot of people drooling.

kodak OLED

One of the issues of OLEDs is their sensitivity to oxygen and moisture, resulting in color shift as the phosphor degrades over time. One way to get around that is to use the OLED as backlight. A white OLED BLU-driven display will not have the color-shift issues of an RGB OLED, but still be extremely thin with excellent color saturation due to the higher quality of white light provided by the OLED. This prototype from Kodak uses an OLED BLU with advanced color filter technology.

samsung OLED



Even though aging issues make larger OLED displays problematic, that doesn't mean that there aren't any large OLEDs around. This collection of 32-inch OLED displays from Samsung SDI shows that large OLEDs are not just one-off samples, but are truly on a commercialization process that will result in a finished product.


-Alix Paultre
Ecnmag.com

Sony CEO Stringer promises 27-inch OLED TV within the next year

According to CEO Howard Stringer, Sony plans to launch a much larger version of its impressive OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) television within the next year.

Sony launched its first OLED TV, an 11-inch model, in late 2007. The set, which also has the distinction of being the first commercial OLED TV in the world, won great acclaim thanks to the smoother, sharper and more richly colored images it offered over today's LCD (liquid crystal display) and PDP (plasma display panel) technologies.

At the same time Sony began showing a prototype 27-inch OLED screen and last month in Tokyo showed an OLED screen that was just 0.3 millimeters thick. Stringer, speaking at The Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference in Carlsbad, California, on Wednesday, introduced the thin prototype and talked about commercialization.

"This is 0.3 millimeters wide, it's a glass, we can produce this in plastic and you can wrap it around your arm, we're not quite sure why you would want to," Stringer told Walt Mossberg, a columnist for the newspaper and co-host of the event. "We're looking for applications for the next generation of the plastic version but this will come out in a 27-inch version fairly soon."

"Within the next 12 months, we haven't given a date," he said when asked to be more specific on timing.

The set would no doubt be released in Japan first, and be released much later in North America like it's younger brother, the 11-inch model.

Stringer didn't give much away when it came to pricing. The 11-inch model, which Sony calls the XEL-1, carries a relatively high price-tag of US$2,500.

"It's a complicated process and obviously we are working very hard to find out how to mass-produce it but until then it's very expensive," said Stringer.

Stringer's reference to a plastic OLED panel was to a prototype announced by the company in May 2007. Then it showed a small 2.5-inch OLED manufactured on a plastic substrate. The screen has a resolution of 160 pixels by 120 pixels and showed full-motion video while being bent and rolled.

Sony hasn't announced any sales targets for its OLED televisions but said earlier this month that it plans to sell 17 million LCD televisions in the fiscal year from April. That's a jump of about 7 million sets on the previous year. Sony hopes to achieve this by producing more models for the mid-market based on panels it will procure from Sharp. High-end sets will continue to feature panels produced by S-LCD, the LCD panel manufacturing joint venture it has with Samsung Electronics.

Samsung's new OLED laptop

Samsung's new OLED laptop shows a thin body and odd, buttonless half-sized keyboard.

The picture of the newest Samsung OLED laptop concept suggests Samsung may actually be prepared to fight for a triple-spike in sales.

The 12.1" laptop is an ultra-thin AMOLED from Samsung's display devision. The 12.1" screen measures in at 1280 x 768 with infinite contrast.

While the display is definately on the mark, the keyboard may not be. A touch-sensitive keyboard seems less than ideal, not to mention only being half size. Notice the flap on the back? My guess is you fold that over the monitor to protect the screen where the halfling keyboard cannot.

Samsung OLED Laptop Coming in 2009?

It looks like Samsung might be bringing OLED to laptops, and they look pretty darn cool. Engadget is reporting that consumers could see the AMOLED (active matrix organic light-emitting diode) concept as soon as 2009. Which consumers, is always a question—Japan? U.S.? Anyone? The 12.1-inch prototype offers a 1280 x 768 resolution and self-illuminating screen. Plans for the super-thin package include 14- and 15.4-inch models. Aside from an improved picture quality, it has a mystery panel around the back that’s quite the buzz on the web.



-electronichouse

Sumitomo set to produce 40-inch OLED panels in 2009

Not that there was any doubt that OLED is on its way to larger sizes (hasn't it been since like 2005?), but Japanese firm Sumitomo Chemical announced its plans to produce 40-inch OLED panels for HDTVs some time in 2009, meaning Sumitomo-based TVs could hit the market in 2009 or 2010. Samsung's old-skool 40-inch OLED HDTV prototype shown above for scale.



-engadget