OLEDs: from glowing wallpaper to flexible televisions
By Michael W. Jones
Light emitting diodes have been around since 1920, but really came into their own in the mid-sixties (General Electric) and the mid-nineties (Nichia Corporation and Cardiff University). Now a new wrinkle has been added. Meet the organic light-emitting diode (OLED), first developed in France and improved further by many researchers including Shirakawa, MacDiarmid, and Heeger, who won a Nobel prize in 2000 for their efforts. Continuing research is now turning theory into reality and OLEDs may be nearly ready for prime time.
General Electric Co. has developed and built an OLED manufacturing machine, and it is currently in commercial use in upstate New York, turning out strips of plastic film that may revolutionize the way we light our homes. The machine is the size of a semi-trailer; the OLEDs themselves are just eight inches wide. What are the advantages of OLEDs? Here are some of the important ones:
They do not require a backlight.
They draw much less power than backlit devices.
They are thinner than traditional LEDs.
They are very flexible.
It is this latter quality of the OLED that may be the most important for now. You can simply wrap a strip of OLED around a pillar in a parking garage, plug it in, and have instant light. You could even use OLEDs to make wallpaper that lights your rooms. This light is quite bright for the LED family, has positive ecological attributes due to its low power consumption, and the flexibility of the film makes it very easy to use. You can put this form of LED almost anywhere there is a little power available, using something as simple as duct tape as an installation methodology.
Although there are still problems to be worked out for other more technical applications, great strides are being made. As an example, Sony already sells a small (11-inch) OLED television, although it is almost prohibitively expensive at $2,500. As usage longevity problems are solved and OLEDS become larger, they will become more popular and the economy of scale will ensure that prices go down. Today, low-power room lighting; tomorrow, televisions and monitors built into your wallpaper. You can’t be too thin or too power-efficient.
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