Seiko Epson

Universal Display and Seiko Epson have been working on their inkjet printable, phosphorescent OLED technology and materials for quite some time... They have now announced new advances in performace:

• A red P²OLED with CIE (0.67, 0.33), an efficiency of 10 candela per ampere (cd/A) and an operating lifetime of 20,000 hours, to 50% of initial luminance of 1,000 nits
• A green P²OLED with CIE (0.33, 0.62), an efficiency of 34 cd/A and an operating lifetime of 25,000 hours.

Last month Seiko Epson has unveiled a new inkjet-printing technology for OLEDs, suitable for large sized panels. We have talked to Satoru Miyashita, General Manager of Seiko Epson's Core Technology Development Center about this new technology and their plans for OLED production.

Q: You have shown a new ink-jet based OLED technology. You say it will enable 37" or larger HD-OLED TVs. Do you have any plans to actually make such TVs? When do you think products can be made with this new tech?
Epson is currently considering a variety of options regarding the commercialization of this technology, but at this point no specific announcements have been made about plans. We see 2012 as being the year that 37"+ OLED TVs will be launched by various makers, and 2015 as the year that sales will really take off for this market.

Espon 14-inch Inkjet processed OLED

Seiko Epson today announced that it has developed a new inkjet technology that enables uniform deposition of OLED materials in large size displays. They believe that this is a major step towards 37" (or larger) HD OLED TVs.

Espon 14-inch Inkjet processed OLED

Seiko Epson claim this is the first technology that can reliably form uniform organic materials on large substrates. The most widely used tech today, Vaccum Thermal Evaporation (VTE) is not able to do it because of several technical issues.

Epson has recently developed the long-awaited solution in the form of an OLED display fabrication process that leverages the company's proprietary Micro Piezo inkjet technology to achieve markedly greater accuracy in organic material deposition than the conventional technology. The process has been used in trial production to fabricate a highly uniform prototype panel. Extremely uniform layers (volume error < 1%) are achieved by precisely controlling the selection and ejection of multi-size droplets of ink material on a substrate so that only the required volume of material is deposited.

Epson will give more details at SID, together with a 14" prototype display (shown above), that has a HD resolution.

It's a bit late, but here are some interesting things that Epson showed at SID this year.

First of all is a 8" OLED display for Automative applications.Epson says that they are in talks with several auto companies to embed those devices in the dash board. You can see a video of the displays in the link below. Epson also showed other OLED displays, including a portable DVD player prototype.

DisplayBlog's Jin Kim talked to Mr. Satoru Miyashita, General Manager of OLED Development Center. Miyashita-san explained that Epson’s OLED displays were manufactured at the company’s G2 R&D fab. He also shared that there are plans to expand OLED production capability by adding a line in the company’s G3 fab located in Tottori. By using a larger G3 fabrication plant, Epson can produce up to 14" OLEDs.

Read more here (DisplayBlog)

Universal Display Corporation will today report advances in the development of P2OLED™, printable, phosphorescent OLED, material systems for use with ink-jet printing processes at the Society for Information Display’s (SID) 2008.

Presenting on a joint paper with Seiko Epson Corporation, Dr. Sean Xia, Senior Research Scientist at Universal Display, will describe advances in red, green and blue P2OLED material systems. Dr. Xia will also discuss the companies’ demonstration of ink-jet printed P2OLED technology and their continuing work to achieve commercial entry performance goals. Ink-jet printing has the potential to be a cost-effective approach for the production of large-area OLED displays.

The collaborative paper is the result of a joint development program during which the two companies successfully demonstrated the compatibility of Universal Display’s P2OLED technology and materials with Epson’s proprietary ink-jet printing process technology.

Through continued development using spin-coating techniques, the team has doubled the projected operating lifetime of its red P2OLED system since late last year to 100,000 hours (from an initial luminance of 500 cd/m2) with CIE coordinates of (0.67, 0.33) and a luminous efficiency of 12 candelas per Ampere (cd/A). The team also improved the projected lifetime of its green P2OLED system with CIE(0.33, 0.62) and a luminous efficiency of 34 cd/A to 63,000 hours (from an initial luminance of 1,000 cd/m2).

The team also made progress in the development of two blue P2OLED systems. A light blue P2OLED system with CIE(0.18, 0.39) and a luminous efficiency of 19 cd/A now has a projected lifetime of 6,000 hours from an initial luminance of 500 cd/m2, also twice that reported late last year. A new blue P2OLED system has more saturated color, with CIE(0.15, 0.22), a luminous efficiency of 6 cd/A and a projected lifetime of 1,000 hours (from an initial luminance of 500 cd/m2).

Universal Display’s PHOLED technology and materials, which offer up to four times higher energy efficiency than traditional OLED systems, are today being incorporated in products manufactured using conventional vacuum thermal evaporation (VTE) equipment. Universal Display’s P2OLED materials and technology are based on this same PHOLED technology, but are designed for use with solution-based manufacturing processes such as ink-jet printing.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. was showing three prototype OLED TVs based on 14-inch panels. That's larger than the 11-inch screens that are in the new Sony TVs but a close look at the Samsung panels revealed some imperfections. In each of the three prototypes on display were pixels locked to a single color.

Japan's Seiko Epson Corp., which has been researching OLED technology for many years, was displaying five prototype 8-inch OLED panels. In contrast to the Samsung panels, the Epson ones didn't have any visible defects and offered a bright, smooth and crisp image. The screens, which are 3 millimeters thick, attracted a crowd at the show -- many more people than the company expected, a representative confided.

Neither Samsung nor Epson would say when their larger TV screens might be ready for mass production.

Samsung SDI Co. Ltd. was showing a bendable 4-inch OLED. The screen was fixed in a slightly curved position and delivered a good picture but again there were imperfections visible. The company was also showing what must be one of the thinnest OLED panels in the world. At just 0.37 millimeters the 2.4-inch QVGA panel is super thin and destined for use in cell phones.

Read more here (PCWorld)