OLED projects

The Clean4Yield project aims to ensure high enough yields for cost-effective organic electronics manufacturing. The project partners will develop new technologies for inspecting, cleaning and repairing moving foils, and detecting and preventing defects in large-scale roll-to-roll production of OLEDs and OPVs.

The Clean4Yield project will work to develop new technologies capable of inspecting moving foils for micro- and nanoscale dust particles and defects, and for cleaning / repairing layers as necessary. It will also explore techniques for preventing dust particles reaching the foil in roll-to-roll environments. The project is coordinated by the Holst Centre/TNO and has sixteen members (multi-national companies, small-to-medium enterprises, universities and research organizations).

Clean4Yield is funded through the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and will run for 36 months beginning May 1, 2012.

www.clean4yield.eu

The COLAE (Commercializing Organic and Large Area Electronics) is a pan-European initiative that aims to promote commercialization of Organic and large-area electronics in Europe. There are 18 partners from 12 countries.

The COLAE partners will jointly develop technology demonstrators and organize training events. As part of the project, the partners will offer several services such as technology feasibility analyses, access to the partners' pilot production facilities, business planning and networking.

COLAE is funded by the EU, and is coordinated by the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Other partners include the Fraunhofer Institute, CSEM and UK's CPI center which will provide access for its OLED lighting pilot line facilities. 

COLAE's web page

EMO (Emerging Market OLED) is a three year project that aims research, develop and eventually produce OLED lighting panels targeting emerging markets in Brazil. This project is a collaboration by Philips and the CERTI Foundation (Reference Center in Innovative Technologies).

TOPDRAWER (Thin organic prototypes, design, research, applications with end-user recognition) will develop and demonstrate a printed manufacturing process that will be integrated into attractive designs that have been created through consultation with potential end-users. The manufacturing process will be proved and tested within PETEC, that will acquire and install a large-area coating line.

TOPDRAWER has secured funding from the UK government, and will start in early November and will run for 2.5 years. This is actually a followup project to TOPLESS, and is also lead by Thorn lighting.

The partners in this project include CDT, Thorn lighting, Tridonic, which makes drivers for luminaires, Pilkington (a glass maker) and Conductive Inkjet Technology (CIT).

So-Light is a German project that aims to develop OLED displays and lighting applications - including new materials (transport materials, redox dopants, triplet-emitters, matrix materials), new optical technologies for guided light distribution, characterizing lighting application aspects of OLEDs and process technologies for Small Molecule OLEDs. So-Light will also generate studies on applications and demonstrators, and will also work on integrating technologies for application areas such as automotive, architecture and backlight units for large displays).

The project's cost is 14.7 Million Euro, and is supported by the German BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research).

So-Light project partners are: Novaled AG (Dresden), Sensient Imaging Technologies GmbH (Bitterfeld-Wolfen), Fraunhofer IPMS (Dresden), LEDON OLED Lighting GmbH & Co. KG (Dresden), Aixtron AG (Aachen), Fresnel Optics GmbH (Apolda), Hella KGaA Hueck & Co (Lippstadt), Siteco Beleuchtungstechnik GmbH (Traunreut), AEG-MIS mbH (Ulm), Universität Paderborn/L-LAB (Paderborn) and the Westfälische Wilhelms Universität Münster (Münster).

LILi (Light InLine) is a 3-year project started at July 2009 with an aim to develop processes to lower the cost of manufacturing large-area and efficient OLED Lighting for general illumination applications.. The partners are Merck, Applied Materials and the Braunschweig University of Technology.

The total cost of the project is about 7.5 million euros (just over $11 million). Almost half is provided by the German government, and the rest by the companies themselves.

Fast2Light is an integrated (9 companies, 3 research institutes and 2 universities) R&D project that aims to research and develop light emitting foils based on OLED tech. The overall objective of Fast2Light is to develop novel, cost-effective, high-throughput, roll-to-roll, large area deposition processes for fabricating light-emitting polymer-OLED foils for intelligent lighting applications.

All layers that are part of a large area lighting foil will be addressed starting with the substrate choice, and introducing high-throughput deposition and patterning methods for all of the materials necessary to fabricate the final lighting foil. Ultimately, the project will demonstrate a 30cm x 30cm, high quality lighting foil, manufactured with new optimised, disruptive R2R processes. While the project will focus on polymers, the platforms developed will be fully compatible with SMOLEDs. 

The project also aims to minimize the potential environmental impact at this product design stage, as well as analyse in depth the repercussions throughout the life cycle, including the end of useful life stage.

In April 2008, we interviewed the Project's manager, Mary Kilitziraki.

Fast2Light's web page

Project TOPLESS (Thin Organic Polymeric Light Emitting Semi-conductor Surfaces) is a three year £3.3M project,  sponsored by the UK government (50%). It comprises a consortium of Thorn Lighting (UK largest lighting company), Sumation UK and the University of Durham (Department of Physics and Chemistry).

The aim of the project is to product a high quality white light generating single polymer, and efficient large area single pixel device architectures.

TOPLESS project OLED lamp prototype 2008

• An efficacy of 20Lm per watt
• Colour temperature suitable for general white light applications (this varies according to customer requirements) between 2,700K to 17,000K.
• Large single pixel devices (no buzz bars)
• Minimal number of organic layers

TOPLESS will run till February 2010. In June 2008 we interviewed Dr. Geoff Williams, the project manager.

In December 2008, TOPLESS showed a prototype lamp. The efficiency is about 17Lm/W (as there is no out-coupling. With out-coupling the efficiency is over 30Lm/W), each panel operating at 3W. The panels are just 0.7mm thick, made by Sumation with TOPLESS materials

ROLLEX means Roll-to-roll production of highly efficient light-emitting diodes on flexible substrates. The project members (Franhofer Institute, Novaled, Philips and others) developed ways to make flexible OLED lighting devices using roll-to-roll printing technologies.

The project was completed on April 2010, and the companies has announced a follow-up project (ROLLEX 2).