DoE to fund PHOLED lighting panel pilot line

Sara Ver-Bruggen - 20 Jan 2010

The US Department of Energy (DoE) is to fund a pilot line for making phosphorescent OLED (PHOLED) lighting panels.

Universal Display Corporation (UDC) is the award recipient. Team member Moser Baer Technologies will supply equipment for the line. The India-headquartered diversified technology company manufactures CDs, other optical storage media and photovoltaics.

The project will use UDC's PHOLED technology and provide prototype lighting panels to US luminaire manufacturers to incorporate into products, to facilitate testing of design, and to gauge customer acceptance.

The line could be operational from 2011 onwards. Its precise location in the US has not been made public yet.

Exact funding and more details on the UDC-Moser Baer project, as well the 17 others under DoE's Solid State Lighting (SSL) initiative, will be publicised in the next two weeks. Though the majority of the selections are projects based on LED technology there are a few notable OLED-focused ones.

The UDC-Moser Baer selection also provides for a second PHOLED lighting panel line to be built, geared for supplying commercial volumes of panels once the process used by the pilot line is proven.

The project could enable Moser Baer Technologies' to become an early supplier to the nascent commercial OLED lighting market. Dr G Rajeswaran, who serves as group CTO for all the Moser Baer business units and is CEO for launching new businesses, spent 22 years with Eastman Kodak and sat on the board of SK Display Corporation, a JV between Kodak and Sanyo [since dissolved] set up to commercialise OLEDs in digital cameras.

The project could also signal UDC is moving into OLED panel production, a strategic move that could in time allow the company - a core materials supplier - greater control within the OLED lighting supply chain.

By carrying out processing and manufacturing across different technology products Moser Baer drives down production costs and could in future use this approach to reduce the expense of high volume OLED lighting manufacture.

In another selection under the DoE programme PPG Industries will work with UDC to develop a low-cost glass substrate for OLED lighting. Through focused, short-term applied research on new electrode and light extraction coatings, PPG plans to develop the OLED lighting integrated substrate using low-cost soda lime float glass plus transparent anode materials and light extraction layers.