The Holst Centre's spring partner meeting took place a few days ago, and now they released some nice short videos from this event. First up is a short introduction to OLED lighting technology, with some OLED lighting panels (including the cute DinOLED presentation, made by a 13 years old with a Dinosaur):

A year ago Holst and imec announced a new program to develop high resolution flexible OLED displays. The partners are developing a mechanically flexible encapsulation film and TFT backplane, a printed high-efficiency OLED and new materials and processes. Now they are presenting their first flexible display:

The EU launched a new €11.2-million 3-year project called Flex-o-Fab that aims to help commercialize flexible OLEDs within six years. The project partners will create a a pilot-scale modular yet integrated manufacturing chain for flexible OLEDs, and use it to develop reliable fabrication / production processes.

The Flex-o-Fab project will draw on technologies and expertise already used to produce glass-based OLEDs and flexible displays. It will look to migrate existing sheet-to-sheet processes to roll-to-roll (R2R) production to further reduce costs and enable high-volume production. The encapsulation, one of the key challenges of flexible panel production, will be the multilayer barrier technology developed by Holst Centre. The project will also develop novel anode technologies that will need to be transparent with low resistivity, reliable, robust and scalable for R2R production on foil substrates.

The European MOMA project (eMbedded Organic Memory Arrays) has developed the largest re-programmable non-volatile memory arrays yet produced on flexible substrates. The project developed two prototypes - a 256-bit transistor-based one and 1-kbit diode-based arrays.

MOMA is now drawing to a successful close, and the partners hope that it will lead towards commercialization of flexible electronics applications with embedded memory. In the remaining months of the project, the partners will combine all these building blocks into a 96-bit array with the related read/write circuitry, creating a complete embedded flexible memory suitable for applications such as Electronic Product Code (EPC) tags.

The Holst Centre has fabricated two flexible OLED lighting panels and gave them to the Queen of the Netherlands (one will be given to the Slovakian president). The OLED panels are placed inside 3D-printed curved frames:

The OLED panels are lighting photos of the Queen's grandchildren and a couple of photos from her visit to Slovakia. The photos are black/white masks with resolution 20 micron which are placed on the top of the OLED panels. The Holst centre can actually create these images directly in the OLED (i.e. a structured OLED), but this time they just placed the mask in front of the OLED because of a tight schedule. I'm not sure if that's the most impressive flexible OLED demonstration I've seen, but it sure is a nice gift for the queen.

The Holst Center posted this short video showing how their flexible OLED lighting panel prototypes work under water, virtue of their thin-film protective barrier:

Sumitomo Chemical has joined the Holst Centre's shared research program on Printed Organic Lighting and Signage. The program's aim is to develop new manufacturing processes that enable low-cost flexible OLEDs. Sumitomo will help the program's investigation of multi-layer solution processes for high-efficiency OLEDs, using the company's PLED materials.

Flexible OLED lighting prototype

Sumitomo will provide other program members access to its OLED materials - especially the emitting materials. Sumitomo will be able to use the program's expertise in order to optimize its own materials for low-cost production and flexible substrates.

The Holst Centre and Rolic Technology have entered into a research partnership on protective moisture barriers for flexible electronics applications such as OLED and OPV. Rolic will develop new materials that will enable commercialization of of high-end flexible barriers and solutions for improved light out-coupling.

The Holst Centre aims to develop this thin film barrier fabrication technology for sheet-to-sheet (S2S) application as well as roll-to-roll (R2R). The focus of this projects seems to be OLED lighting, but this will also apply to OLED displays and OPV panels. In the photo above (sent by the Holst Centre) you can see an OLED panel with black spot defects (left), and the same panel, protected by a thin film barrier, without defects. The panels themselves are Philips Lumiblade OLED lighting panels, made on rigid glass.

Plextronics and the Holst Centre are going to partner on research towards flexible OLED lighting, with an aim to improve the scaling of lab device performance to large area OLED lighting and signage devices.

Plextronics will provide its Plexcore hole injection and hole transport inks to the Holst Center shared research program. Those inks will be used to create functional OLED demonstrators. Plextronics will benefit from the research result - and will be able to further optimize their products.

The Holst Centre submited eight proposals for funding from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), and five projects won funding, included two OLED lighting specific projects: IM3OLED,  a software tool for multiscale OLED lighting modeling and IMOLA which will develop large-area OLED lighting modules with built-in intelligent light management.

The Holst Centre and Solvay report advances in flexible OLED lighting panels. They present a bendable 69 cm² OLED panel that features 30 lm/W efficiency at 1000 cd/m²: