Efforts step up to develop printable OLED lighting

Sara Ver-Bruggen - 23 Feb 2010

Investment in printable and solution processable organic EL materials is growing as the industry looks to reduce the cost of making OLED lighting panels.

While the first OLED lighting panels to enter the market - from companies such as Philips, Osram and Lumiotec - are vacuum processed, more and more companies are giving serious attention to printable OLED lighting. They include materials suppliers and potential panel makers.

In the next few months organic electronics materials firm Plextronics will announce a new solution to enhance its offering to developers of printable OLEDs for lighting and other applications.

'We are seeing increasing momentum in efforts to develop OLED lighting with companies looking to exploit both vacuum processable and printing technologies,' says Jim Dietz, VP of business development at the Pittsburgh-based firm.

Dietz predicts in the coming years focus on developing printed- and polymer-OLED lighting devices will intensify, as companies aggressively explore ways to reduce the cost of panel production. This can be achieved through several approaches, such as reducing the number of layers used to make an organic LED stack - simplifying the production steps - and using processes that cut back on materials waste. Concurrently, OLED lighting panel developers like Lumiotec are also working on modifying vacuum processing chambers to reduce scope for materials waste.

NEMO

In November 2009, Merck KGaA announced it was developing soluble materials for OLEDs in both lighting and display applications to enable cost-effective production of devices.

Merck is undertaking this work as part of a consortium project it is leading, co-funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with a total budget of around €32 million.

New materials for OLEDs from Solutions (NEMO) includes four industrial companies and several academic partners. HC Starck Clevios and Ormecon are in the consortium.

The new luminescent materials being developed within NEMO should improve scalability and coating efficiency in particular. In order to achieve even coverage on substrates during vacuum processing, a large portion of the materials used to fabricate an OLED stack is wasted, while printing can deposit materials where they are needed.

The NEMO project partners are focusing on soluble, RGB phosphorescent materials. In order to develop marketable solutions quickly, different injection, transport and electrode materials, as well as adhesives, are being researched, evaluated and tested in parallel for their performance.

 

Commercial work

Efforts to develop processes for manufacturing printable OLED lighting are escalating. In the UK, CDT/Sumitomo and Thorn Lightingare planning a second phase project that will test production of polymer OLED lighting devices on printing and similar equipment, potentially accessed through PETEC. Other projects in Europe are focusing on a convergence of printed and vaccum processing to make OLED devices.

In Japan, Panasonic Electric Works is working on such hybrid approaches, while recently Pioneer and Mitsubishi Chemical announced they are jointly developing printable OLED lighting.

In the US, GE Research will receive funding from the Department of Energy to upgrade its pre-pilot OLED roll-to-roll production line, using phosphorescent small-molecule OLED materials, advanced OLED device architectures, plastic ultra-high barrier films, and encapsulation in partnership with DuPont.