The €11-million 3-years European Flex-o-Fab project was launched in January 2013 with an aim to help commercialize flexible OLEDs. The Holst Centre, the project's coordinator, announced that the Flex-o-Fab successfully completed its goals - including developing indium-free electrodes (based on ZTO with a supporting metal grid) and brighter OLEDs (light emission was enhanced by about 30% using a plastic substrate with outcoupling features).

The project used a distributed pilot production line and associated manufacturing chain involving partners and facilities at different locations across Europe. The project partners managed to migrate key processes from sheet-to-sheet processing to roll-to-roll production. .

According to Digitimes, Taiwan's ITRI is building a Roll-to-Roll (R2R) R&D pilot line to produce flexible OLED lighting panels. The line will be operative by 2017, and will be able to produce about 700 panels per month.

ITRI's new OLEDs will be based on flexible glass substrates. Back in 2012 ITRI collaborated with Corning to develop a full roll-to-roll process on 100um flexible glass Willow glass substrates. It's likely that the new line will also use Corning's Willow glass.

The UK-based Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) recently installed a new roll to roll (R2R) slot die/screen printing and encapsulation line that can be used to print, coat and pattern a range of organic and in-organic solution based coatings.

The new line can assist researchers with development towards commercialization of a host of printable electronics applications - including photovoltaics, OTFT and printed batteries. The system was custom-built by VDL, and it consists of two pieces of equipment - a roll to roll slot die coating and rotary screen printing and a coating toolset.

In 2012 the EU launched the TREASORES project (Transparent Electrodes for Large Area Large Scale Production of Organic Optoelectronic Devices) that aimed to develop technologies that will lower the production costs of organic electronic devices.

The Fraunhofer FEP now reports that the project concluded successfully and one of the results was the development of several new transparent electrode and barrier materials. The project partners developed electrodes based on carbon nanotubes, metal fibres or thin silver - and these electrodes (some of which are already mass produced) enabled the creation of the OLED lighting device you can see above.

The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) is a UK based R&D institute that helps companies develop and scale manufacturing processes. The CPI, in collaboration with Heidelberg Instruments have developed a new high-resolution high-speed roll-to-roll (R2R) digital lithography tool for the manufacture of flexible organic thin film transistors (OTFTs).

The machine is already installed at the CPI's National Printable Electronics Facility in County Durham, UK. The new tool provides the ability to continuously manufacture OTFTs directly onto rolls of plastic film at rates approaching 0.1 m²/min.

The UK Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) and Beneq signed a collaboration agreement to commercialise atomic layer deposition (ALD) technologies for printed electronics applications.

CPI OLED production line

Beneq and the CPI will create an open access environment for companies to develop ultra barrier solutions in areas such as photovoltaics, OLEDs, microelectronics and sensors. The CPI recently installed two ALD deposition tools from Beneq for the development of conformal nano-scale coatings - one batch ALD tool and one state of the art roll-to-roll ALD (R2R ALD) system. In particular the roll-to-roll ALD tool processing technology will be actively developed between the two companies.

3M announced that they entered into a licensing agreement with Lotus Applied Technology, which gives 3M access to Lotus' TransFlexALD spatial Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) and barrier materials patent portfolio.

The TransFlexALD is a roll-to-roll ALD deposition that can be used to make single-layer encapsulation layers suitable for OLED panels (and other devices).

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is launching a new project called KONFECT that aims to develop flexible OLED glass for OLED applications. BMBF is awarded €5.6 million towards the three-year project that seeks to refine windable glass through lamination with functional adhesive tapes and by applying special functional layers.

The project consortium includes three partners - Schott, tesa and VON ARDENNE. Schott and tesa will develop reliable encapsulation by combining Schott's flexible glass with tesa's barrier tape while Von Ardenne will developing a vacuum coating system specifically for roll-to-roll (R2R) coating of flexible glasses.

The US Department of Energy (DoE) awarded two small-business SBIR Phase-2 projects targeting advances in solid-state lighting technology, and both projects deal with OLED lighting technologies.

The first project, led by Pixelligent Technologies is titled "Advanced Light Extraction Material for OLED Lighting". Pixelligent, in collaboration with OLEDWorks, will demonstrate a new internal light extraction structure for OLED lighting panels, that is fully compatible with current manufacturing processes and operating conditions. The ILE structure is cost-effective and offers a high high refractive index.

Konica Minolta recently started mass producing flexible OLED lighting panels, and the Japanese company now announced that it shipped 15,000 flexible OLEDs to a Japanese Tulips Festival - by far the largest OLED installation to date.

The OLED "Shining Tulip Festival" will take place at the Japanese Huisch Tembosch theme park, from February 14th to April 13th. Konica are making both white and color-tunable OLEDs, but it seems that this installation uses only white panels.