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Light Emitting Pictures On Standard Inkjet Printer
CrashRide writes: "This story on FOX states that UofA scientists have discovered a way to print light-emitting pictures on thin sheets of plastic using a standard inkjet printer. Fold up pocket monitors?" The article says that these scientists have produced "OLEDs of simple bands of light, a scorpion, the University of Arizona logo and even photographs of themselves."
There is a better story on the UA newspaper. And here is the link to research department. Not much here yet except for an animation.
This is just a poster that glows -- it's a static picture that glows using a low amount of electricity. Unless you're running Windows, and all you need to display is the same bsod, you'll need a more "dynamic" display :).
If you can print conducting traces, you could set up a grid pattern of traces around pixels that would let you selectively activate pixels, much as you do in a passive-matrix LED. At any given time, one horizontal line (say) would be ground, and the rest would be at Vdd. Vertical lines would be driven or not driven depending on whether you want pixels in the active line on or off. If these printed pixels really are OLEDs - diodes - then you won't have to worry about the other horizontal traces shorting across the vertical lines.
I'm sure there are a number of ways of printing conducting traces with ink. Even a high-resistance trace could be electroplated after printing with thicker metal.
The only question is whether a) the type of OLEDs printed with this technology are really diodes, passing current only in one direction, and 2) whether instantaneous current can be high enough to give an acceptable _average_ current (and brightness) per row over the whole scanning cycle. A row turned on one thousandth of the time needs to be a thousand times as bright when it's on.
Other methods of addressing pixels in a display are of course possible. This is just one of the easiest (not necessarily best).
Not trusting the headline whores at fox news, I did a little searching on google and found this article published in June of 2000. It has a better review of the actually technology from a pure science point of view, rather than the "marketing press release as if it were a product" garbage that was posted.
"Get them before they get....
does this mean that they can be wired back to back to create spray on transistors? Ultracheap custom chips
Spray on transistors are almost there. (The linked article mentions some spray on circuitry but the (fast) transistors are rubber-stamped, they're still working on spraying those). The folks described here are doing spray-on polymer transistors.
Hmm, couple the LEDs, the transistors and some good optical sensors and you can make yourself a cloak of invisibility...
-- Alastair
Rather than illumination, they use electrified pigments or rotaing, embedded spheres to change the color of a sheet of plastic. One difference with the technology at UoA is that charge is only needed to change the image, not maintain it. One of the developers described it as "paper that prints itself," which gives you an idea of what kind of applications it could be used for (e.g. hourly updated price signs=good. Monitor to watch a live video stream=bad).
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
When I was a graduate student at UCLA in 1998, I heard of Professor their that already patented the process for using ink-jet printing techology for creating Organic LED devices. The original paper is: S.C. Chang, J. Bharathan, and Y. Yang; "Dual-color polymer LEDs processed by hybrid inkjet printing technology", Appl. Phys. Lett., 73, 2561, (1998). If you want to know more about this, visit Dr Yang's website at http://www.seas.ucla.edu/ms/faculty1/yang-yang.htm l.
Heres a link to a neat demo of how OLEDs work.
http://www.optics.arizona.edu/oled/
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Here is an intersting page at universaldisplay corp. It includes some neat pictures and some video clips of the thing working. Not quite the same, but its OLED and on a flexible display. Neat.
http://www.universaldisplay.com/foled.php
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
there's a lot of info missing from the crappy article linked. I myself are working with OLED's and the way these people represent there results is complete BS!!!
All this work has already been done a few years ago, and they dont mention that you still need to have ITO electrodes to keep te thing running/emitting light. And the distance between top/bottom or right to left side is in my idea way too long.
People may like to look at the website of Cambridge Display Technology, who invented LEPs.
Ho hum for the life of a bear
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/2001/01/02/0102dv orak.html
A Plastics Revolution
John C. Dvorak, Forbes.com, 01.02.01, 12:01 AM ET
This is the week where I run ahead of the pack and tell you what the future holds. The idea is to pick those killer tech stocks for 2001 and beyond.
After the fiasco of 2000 and the collapse of dot-com stocks, something funny happened. The dot-bombs took with it the entire technology sector, pushing them to 52-week lows and presenting numerous long-term investment opportunities. But instead of telling you to buy "wireless" and "infrastructure"--like everyone else is going to do--I want you to look at something completely different.
The direction of high-tech might be shifting gears in ways we are just beginning to understand as the development of "conducting polymers" moves forward into real products. As kids we always thought of plastic as an insulator. This is no longer true and the entire field of conducting polymers was given a scientific blessing when Alan Heeker, Hideki Shirikawa and Alan MacDiarmid won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work with conducting polymers. I never expected chemistry to bump into electronics like this, but it has.
Organic displays. The hottest segment in the market for 2001 might be display technology. There are numerous trends and counter trends which are about to emerge and create an interesting volatility. This happens when an established technology goes into overproduction just as new competing technologies emerge, creating a shakeout and an eventual winner that becomes a dominant player--perhaps a gorilla--and the stock of that company skyrockets.
In displays, we are approaching an overproduction of active matrix liquid crystal displays (LCD), which should depress the market for these displays. Note: If you've been waiting to get a flat panel, start shopping in a few months and you should find some incredible deals.
Just as this is happening, a number of new technologies are emerging to take away the low-end small screen market away from the LCD makers. This includes the flat cathode ray tube from Candescent Technologies and a promising technology dubbed organic, light emitting diode (LED). These new LEDs which can be turned into high-speed flat panels are competitive with LCDs, but with many advantages.
Brightly glowing plastic. Look for this material to be referred to as a light-emitting polymer. And look for what seems to be a semantic variation called organic electro luminescent displays. Whatever these things are finally called, they are cheap and will dominate the displays of handheld devices in the near term and possibly all displays in the long term. It's unknown when these things will appear in a larger 15-inch plus format. But you'll see them on cell phones this July. This development may also trigger a more interesting phone.
Organics chips. The "plastics" revolution doesn't end with new display polymers. It gets weirder with actual semiconductors, potentially made from plastics, with the circuits printed on them by an ink-jet printer. The concept was recently demonstrated at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco. Generically dubbed "organic" circuitry, actual semiconductor devices have been demonstrated using special plastics and high-resolution ink-jet printers from Epson. You should note that the size of these devices are huge by comparison to normal circuitry--around 20 times larger. But the fact that any of this works in the first place is remarkable. And there seems to be a sense that by 2005, there will be commercial applications.
Much of the experimentation is taking place at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Cambridge. Cambridge is working with Seiko-Epson and a regional Cambridge operation called Plastic Logic, which seems devoted to commercializing some of these ideas.
The most interesting thing about the plastic semiconductor revolution is its cheap disposable nature. In fact, there is a lot of talk nowadays about the disposability of many of the products we buy. You can't actually fix anything any more. It's simply cheaper to buy a new one.
There is a certain sentimentalism about the old "tube" days when you could take vacuum tubes out of a device that was failing and suddenly it worked again when a new tube was inserted.
Old-timers always forget what a hassle the tube test was. In fact, these plastic devices are expected to last as long as a decade before failing completely--not as long as current silicon technology should last but much longer than a tube. Then it gets tossed--recycled perhaps.
Exactly where the new plastics revolution is going to take us is unknown. I suspect it will be to a new level of inexpensive, more eco-friendly yet powerful devices. Once the little organic LEDs appear on the market in 2001, you'll start to hear a lot more about this new revolution.