Flexible OLED

Back in April 2011 Corning produced a nice video called A Day Made of Glass, showing future designs made with durable, transparent and even flexible glass displays. Now Corning is back with a sequel, showing the same family but with some new ideas in the home, car, classroom, outdoor and work environments:

A lot of these displays can be achieved with OLEDs, although OLEDs aren't specifically mentioned in those video. Just a few days ago Corning announced an OLED glass joint-venture with Samsung. Corning also released an unpacked version of this video- that includes explanations about the technology shown in the video:

There are reports that LG Display decided to built a pilot 3.5-Gen (730 × 460 mm) flexible OLED production line. They have ordered the equipment, which will arrive by 3Q 2012, and the line will become active by the end of 2012. An official from LGD is quoted saying that it will take 1-2 years to develop and verify the process and produce prototypes. The company hasn't decided on a production schedule yet.

LG Display's flexible OLEDs will use the same technology as Samsung's flexible prototypes - a polymide coated substrate and direct-emission RGB sub-pixels (as opposed to LG's OLED TV which use WOLED with color filters).

Back in October 2011 Futaba bought out TDK's part in their joint OLED company, which is now a subsidiary of Futaba. Today we got hold of Futaba's OLED roadmap for 2011-2015. For the consumer market, Futaba is currently offering small (around 2") PMOLED displays. They are also offering 2.4" transparent panels, but it seems to be made in small quantities. The company plans to start producing 4.3" QVGA AMOLED displays by 2014 (mass production in 2015), transparent PMOLEDs in 2013, and flexible PMOLEDs by 2014-2015.

Futaba is also planning to start using OLEDs in printer heads. They currently use VFD technology and will adopt OLEDs in 2012-2013. For the automotive market, Futaba currently offers 0.9", 2.0", 3.4" and 3.5" monochrome panels, and they plan to use the flexible and transparent OLEDs in the "center stack" - basically anywhere inside the vehicle - steering wheel, dash up, windshield and on curved surfaces. The company is also interested in round shaped OLEDs. Products for the automotive market will arrive by 2014.

The Holst Centre and imec announced a new high-resolution flexible OLED displays research program. This new program builds on the existing research fields such Organic and Oxide Transistors and Flexible OLED lighting. The new program aims to develop an economically scalable route to flexible AMOLED mass production, facing challenges such as high resolution, low power consumption, large area, outdoor readability, flexibility and light weight.

The partners will develop a mechanically flexible encapsulation film and TFT backplane, a printed high-efficiency OLED, new materials and processes that will allow cheaper production at better quality and driver design. They will also develop a new manufacturing equipment such as fine patterning equipment for backplanes and tools for integrated roll-to-roll manufacturing. This new program follows up on the FLAME project. Above you can see a prototype Polymer-Vision made flexible OLED made together with imec and the Holst Center.

OSRAM is one of the leading companies developing (and marketing) OLED lighting. Dr. Ulrich Eisele, head of OSRAM's OLED unit, was kind enough to answer a few questions we had for him regarding OSRAM's OLED program:

Q: You recently presented a new flexible OLED that features 32 lm/W. Can you us some more information on this panel?

A: The outstanding feature of the flexible OLED shown is that the production is based on well-tried OSRAM OLED processes. The production line is located in Regensburg (Bavaria), so we can benefit from our local expertise.

Researchers from Dresden's University of Technology (TU Dresden) developed new highly efficient white top-emitting OLED design that feature "outstanding" color quality, and is compatible with flexible OLEDs. In this new design a refractive index matched microlens film was laminated to the top-emitting OLED to form direct optical contact. This enabled the researchers to achieve a CRI of 93, CIE coordinates of (0.472, 0.430) and an emission from 410 to 750 nm that almost spans the complete visible spectrum (380 to 780 nm). The efficiency is up to 30 lm/W (on par with the latest record white OLEDs from Novaled and OSRAM).

The lamination of such an outcoupling structure should be fully roll-to-roll compatible and even allows to be used as an encapsulation film when water and oxygen barriers are added.

Samsung Mobile Display produced a short Video (in Korean) showing a transparent, flexible 3D AMOLED display based tablet. This is obviously just a concept device, and it'll take years before they'll be able to commercialize something like that, but it's still cool:

Flexible OLEDs are still not available, but Samsung does plan to start producing these in 2012. The first screens will probably not be bendable ones, but Samsung will be able to produce them on curved surfaces. Several other companies (including Sony, AUO, LG, HP, Toshiba, TDK and others) are working towards flexible OLEDs. This technology is exciting device makers, too - check out Nokia's Kinetic prototype - a completely flexible mobile phone. Apple is also interested in such displays.