UDC: Significant Advances in Printable PHOLED Materials for Ink-Jet Printing in Collaboration with Seiko Epson

Universal Display Corporation today reported significant progress in the development of P2OLED printable, phosphorescent OLED materials for use with solution-based manufacturing processes, which display manufacturers consider a prospective solution for the cost-effective production of large-area OLED displays.

Reported in a joint paper with Seiko Epson Corporation (Epson) given today at the Society for Information Display’s 2007 International Display Workshop (IDW) Conference in Sapporo, Japan, these advances are the result of a three-year joint development program during which the two companies focused on the successful demonstration of Universal Display’s P2OLEDs for application to Epson’s proprietary ink-jet printing process technology.

Given by Epson’s Takuya Sonoyama, the paper reported progress in red, green and blue P2OLED device performance in spin-coated devices and ink-jet printed devices. Demonstrating the high luminous efficiency of PHOLED technology, the team made significant progress in extending the operating lifetimes of its red and green material P2OLED systems: Red with CIE(0.66, 0.33), luminous efficiency of 9 cd/A and > 50,000 hours of operating lifetime to 50% of initial luminance (at 500 cd/m2) and green with CIE(0.33, 0.63), 35 cd/A and > 50,000 hours (at 1000 cd/m2). The team also reported data for a new sky blue P2OLED with CIE(0.19, 0.40), 18 cd/A and > 3,000 hours (at 500 cd/m2). In addition, results with ink-jet printed P2OLED devices were reported which demonstrate the excellent film-forming ability of the small molecule layers. Ink-jet printed green P2OLED devices were also demonstrated to have the same efficiency as those of the spin-coated control P2OLEDs following an in-depth study of solvent selection and process optimization.

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

Posted: Dec 05,2007 by Ron Mertens