GE Announces Efficiency Breakthrough in White OLED Technology

GE Global Research, the technology development arm for the General Electric Company, GE Lighting and Konica Minolta have achieved a significant advance that brings the companies closer to making high-efficiency organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting devices a reality. GE and KM scientists have demonstrated illumination-quality white OLEDs using “solution-coatable” materials that are essential for producing OLEDs at a low cost.

“GE and KM have done what many in the OLED research community thought was not possible,” noted Duggal. “We have produced high-performance white OLED lighting devices with a commercially viable lifetime using ‘solution coating’ rather than ‘vacuum coating’ processes,” said Anil Duggal, GE’s OLED lighting technology leader. “This allows us to make use of the high volume roll-to-roll manufacturing infrastructure that already has been perfected in the printing industry.”

GE and KM plan to manufacture OLEDs using high-speed, roll-to-roll processes rather than the vacuum-based batch processes used by companies in the OLED display industry. Roll-to-roll processing is key to making OLEDs commercially viable for general lighting applications. Solution, or wet coating, is the highest throughput manufacturing method for coating the organic layers that are the essence of an OLED lighting device.

“This type of coating is ideally suited for roll-to-roll processing and critical to enabling the production of OLEDs at high speeds,” said John Strainic, global product general manager for GE Lighting. “In simple terms, this latest achievement means we’re starting to see the OLED light at the end of the tunnel.”

GE and KM plan to introduce their first flexible OLED lighting product in 2011.

Craig DiLouie

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