Due to the slow development of displays, the OLED industry is focusing its resource and efforts on developing products for the energy-efficient lighting market, forecast to be worth €45 billion by 2015. Many agree that to be mainstream, OLED lamps will have to be affordable.
Several companies with intentions to manufacture OLED lamps outline their approach for bringing down the cost of OLED lighting and the challenges developing the technology:
William Feehery, president, OLEDs, DuPont, US
At this early stage we are looking at both flexible and glass. The process that would yield the absolute cheapest products would be roll-to-roll (R2R), which you need a flexible substrate for. One of our joint ventures - DuPont Teijin Films - is developing substrates for organic electronics.
The OLED lighting industry is still at a stage where we don't know what of all these approaches is going to work.
Anil Duggal, OLED research scientist, GE Research, US
The line we have in Niskayuna, New York state, is what we are calling a pre-pilot R2R line. We don't reproduce every lab sample on the line. We identify what we want to reproduce and then see if we can transfer some of these on the pre-pilot line. We hope to start producing flexible OLED lighting by the end of 2010.
Unlike the companies in Europe, there are multiple companies in the US with differing technical approaches to developing cost-effective lighting. At this time, one single government-funded programme would not allow the technologies to mature enough to determine the optimal way to develop OLEDs.
Takuya Komoda, research director, advanced technologies research laboratory, Panasonic Electric Works
We are exploring several production processes, including hybrid: printing and vacuum, as well as R2R.
We are firmly in an R&D stage. We have demonstration samples but have not distributed them yet.
In our government- (NEDO-) funded project our partners, that are also developing OLED lighting, are Idemitsu Kosan and Tazumo. Other partners, such as suppliers of the materials and vacuum process technologies, include NSCC and Nissan Chemicals for material supply and Choshu Industry for vacuum technology.
Developing OLED lighting requires the integration of various fields and technologies, such as organic semiconductors and optical design. We want to collaborate with other companies and research organisations with related enabling technologies.
Stefan Grabowski, Philips Research, researcher on OLED100.eu
We have to optimise the device architecture to create more light and also work on the light outcoupling, to extract as much light as possible. Lifetime tests are happening, but we won't know the results of these yet.
We are also looking at production processes to produce cheaper OLEDs, which could include printing techniques, such as screen.
Junji Kido, co-founder, Lumiotec, Japan
Making OLED lighting panels requires lots of technologies, not just vacuum evaporation. To be very competitive I wanted to have a company that integrates everything. The panels will consume about 10-15 watts and produce about 25 lumens per watt, still a way off the target at what lighting companies are prepared to work with.
Over the next year, Lumiotec will produce samples initially on a small line, to help establish a marketplace for OLED lighting, whilst ironing out any production issues and improving the technology's performance, in time for scale up by 2012, which is when the OLED lighting market is forecasted to start really taking off. Unlike its competitors, Lumiotec's stakeholders aren't lighting industry incumbents. This next three years will allow the business to improve its technology, production yields, and efficiencies and establish demand.
At Yamagata University we have been experimenting with R2R as well as vacuum evaporation, but it could take many years for solution processable polymer OLED materials to achieve performances required.