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Thin, Flat LEDs
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a story about how a company called OMRON has developed a totally flat light source which might give traditional LED's a run for their money." And reader ekarjala points to an article in the EE Times about thin, organic LEDs.
Perhaps this will bridge the gap between roll up screens and the current lcd displays? It seems like it will still be awhile before oleds will be available for solid viewing. Any thoughts?
(Sponsored by cheeseSource for President 2012)
Here's the text:
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Omron Corporation (Headquarters: Kyoto; CEO: Yoshio Tateisi) has announced the development of "flat light source" technology aimed to become a new form of LED illumination.
Employment of LED's in such applications as train car brake lights, signals, and displays began in recent years from the viewpoint of energy consumption and in the not-too-distant future they are expected to displace current lighting sources in the average household. The challenges of this kind of LED illumination are considered to be further improving LED brightness and realizing performance comparable with the price.
Incorporating characteristics of low-profile/large surface area/uniformity not found in lighting sources up until now (light bulbs, fluorescent lamps, present LED's), Omron has developed "flat light source" technology. Taking full advantage of its small size/long service life, features inherent to the LED, the "flat light source" will be positioned to realize future unrestricted illumination such as "wall-mounted light" and "portable light."
Using light wave control technology of the currently marketed DR-LED as a base, a precise optics design was implemented for optical beam dispersement to compartmentalize more space, and by doing so increasing the amount of surface area. The light emitting surface area is 30mm x 30mm with a thickness of 6mm, giving it about 50 times more illumination surface area than a typical bullet-type LED of the same thickness. If a bullet-type LED were to be created to match the same amount of illumination surface area, the thickness would have to be between 1/10th and 1/5th greater. Moreover, this technology mixes three colors (blue, green, red) into a single "flat light source," thus making any color possible, something that has proven to be very difficult for light bulbs and fluorescent light.
The scope of applications for the "flat light source" include those which the LED has already advanced into such as train car brake lights, signals and displays. Combining several "flat light source" units together creates enough illumination for wall-mounted light or portable light and its compact size makes it ideal for narrow locations like walls and columns. Plus, color can be freely adjusted making it a truly full color lighting source.
Hereafter, Omron will accelerate the move toward illumination by the low energy consumption contributing LED, and with this newly developed technology as a base, strive to bring the "flat light source" to commercialization.
This will have serious effect on all facets of life. Imagine less intrusive instruments for orthroscopic surguery, saftey lighting on floors that isn't a trip hazard, thinner gadgets, etc. And of course the most important impact... NEW CASE MODS!!!! ;-)
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
Here's a Better link to the story on Omron's web site.
And, "a company called Omron"? Have you not heard of Omron? They're just one of the biggest companies in controllers and industrial automation.
wouldn't that be 2-dimensional? what is this, star trek?
"A company called OMRON" the article says in a distant tone. But please let me add that OMRON is a rather well known consumer brand in Japan. It is a small KYOTO based company that has done many innovations with consumer network products during the last decade. It's exciting to see a middle-sized company come up with something this promising. Proves that size doesn't matter as much as will...(Don't pull that last sentence out of context will you)
"6EQUJ5"
How about a link without MySQL and PHP . . . .
Try Japan Corporate News Net
Coutesy of Google News . . . .
It says they are '50% lower in weight and thickness' than other devices. This doesn't equate to 'totally flat' which I imagined to be a matter of a few molecules thick or perhaps as thick as an organic cell. A light emmitting device as thin as 1 organic cell would be pretty impressive stuff as one would be able to layer it onto pretty much anything and I imagine would be pretty much transparent -- like the thin membranes in onions.
Powered by onion juice.
Then our screens could be used in direct sunlight, like a newspaper. And we could open all the blinds again, at last.
If this is the same Omron hat has been making blood pressure measuring equipment and thermometers (among other things) then this is not just yesterdays news. It's last decade's..
These folks have been making top notch equipment featuring the LEDs in question for ages now...
/. Where the truth
I don't think that link is correct:
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Nowhere on that page does it mention flat LEDs!
Trolling is a art,
I submit:
1. New aerodynamic automobile turn signal, running, and brake lights. They'll be smoothed right into the paint surface.
...
NE asia online
omron technics
Very interesting. I am currently working on a project with a company that is using LumiLeds for a portable light. Being that these LEDS are very small and have about 120 Lumens a piece (not sure how many are in one bank on the light since Im not doing the engineering portion of the development, only the software for the control). If these things are as small as the Lumileds (the picture shows a scale compared to some coin/button, which is a little smaller that the Lumileds with the optics in place), or as bright, this might be a nice alternative. The companies web site was /. already, anyone have any information on this?
At extreme viewing angles, the damn thing just disappears.
from the omeron.com site:
---Information---
Due to system maintenance of our corporate web site, the search engine will not be available between February 25 and March 3. We are very sorry for the inconvenience.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Its a tile barely over a square inch and still a 1/4 inch thick, hardly ready to change lighting tech as we know it.
I was personally hoping for something that would come of the production line by the roll and be applied like wallpaper to my walls or ceilings. Hide wiring in the baseboard moldings. Room not bright enough or the wrong color? Just turn it up . . . .
Well, looking at their technology, it appears that it is basically a Fresnel type mirror that disperses the light from a single LED source. If I recall my undergraduate physics, this sort of thing could result in uneven light distribution and chromatic aberration in lighting surfaces making this less than ideal for displays, especially for those users where color is critically important.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
... the "flat light source" will be positioned to realize future unrestricted illumination such as "wall-mounted light" and "portable light." ...
Wow, science never ceases to amaze me! Maybe next, they'll find a way to put lights on the ceiling, too, and, OOOH! Maybe attach a fan to it, to increase air circulation in my house! I'll have to see if Omron is developing a "flat fan technology" to make this possible.
Money I owe, money-iy-ay
Just wait till the case modders get ahold of these. I can only imagine the attrocities..
Whale
Did anyone else read that post as "Here's a story about how a company called MORON has developed a totally flat light source"
and I'm thinking Holy Crap their marketing team has a tough road ahead
Anything that could make the bezel (display face) of radios and instrument panels slimmer and less space-demanding might save cost and even allow for more informative (or at least decorative) dashboard components. You could make your car's interior look like the Enterprise if you wanted.
the U.S. needs more phat car mods.
hi, I like pancakes -.-- -.-- --..
The press release on Omron's web site gives more information, including a diagram that shows how the device functions. It appears to be a central LED device surrounded by a Fresnel mirror, with the mirror cavity filled by what I would presume to be a material similar to fiber-optic cladding. Light emitted from the LED is reflected off the surface of the cavity-fill material, then bounces off the Fresnel mirror, which focuses the light into a reasonably unidirectional beam; a single unit is 30mm on a side, with a thickness of 6mm.
how impatient are you people? A site is NOT slashdotted just because you have to wait 20 seconds for the server to fill your request.
Oh yeah - this isn't a "flat LED", it's a neat little package of LED light mixer and reflector - it looks like a really nice product.
That was classic intercourse!
Oh. He stole it from here.. Give credit next time, dude.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
OK, I'm presently a bit car-crazy ;)
... three feet overhead. I would much prefer several LED clusters (with diffusers) as my dome light.
... I guess.)
Flat LEDs (heck, current LEDs would be fine, really, but flatter would be better in a space-starved environment like a car) are what I want in a couple specific places in my car:
1) dashboard lights. Mine dashlights died a long time ago, and I'm using a clip-on LED flashlight to illuminate my speedometer etc. This is clunky and ugly in a way that many kids find themselves yelling at their dads for inflicting on the world, but a) dashwork is expensive and b) no joke, my LED flashlight clipped on an airvent does a *much better job* than the dashlights ever did. Granted, it's a cheap car, but still. Dashlights are lousy in most cars, though they've gotten better. But -- and I'm serious about this -- dashlights should NOT be incandescent bulbs any more. They should be LEDs, OLEDs, or some other basically permanent light source. Silly to have such a vital piece of equipment be something as outdated as an incandescent bulb, *and* be so difficult to replace (in most cars).
2) Domelight. Same deal -- domelights are generally lame anyhow, sort of like lighting a candle
3) Overhead reading lights. (For your navigator, lights that don't blind the driver.) Bright LEDs with a shade so they can't be aimed at the driver's face accidentally. (Breakable shade, so you *could* aim them intentionally when you're kidnapped for ransom and are being driven away in your own car
4) Map light -- Think of the LED "stalk" lights for notebook computers. A thin gooseneck with an integral LED for pointing at your book / map / sketchpad (not for the driver).
Bring on the flat LEDs, and send some to the car maker's *design teams* please.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Perhaps this technology could also be used in computer displays? At this point, the backlight behind a flat screen display makes up for most of the bulk. The Apple 23 inch display is something like 8 inches thick where the the backlight is. This technology could be used to create flat panel displays that are even thinner than the ones we have now by providing a bright, flat backlight.
In the long run, we're all dead.
In its current state, LCD seems to be a horrible technology. I go to futureshop or its equivelant and look at the flat screen lcd tvs. There is a dvd playing on it, but it looks fuggin terrible.
LCD monitors generally have less viewing quality, and of course the horrible response time, bad viewing angle, poor contrast, and fixed resolution. I havent seen that many desks that were in such dire need of desk space that they needed to settle for LCD. A guy will buy a lcd tv or monitor and tell himself that the ghosting really isnt thaaat bad, or the viewing angle doesnt bother him thaaat much. These people are just fooling themselves because LCD is really the only real flatscreen tech on the market right now.
I believe when OLEDs hit the market LCD will pretty much be useless obslete technology. OLED has a fixed resolution, true, but suffers from none of the other disadvantages.
Look at this picture.
After seeing something that amazing from a prototype, i really dont see a future for LCD in the computing world. Maybe somewhere in the embedded arena where a non-backlit LCD would suffice, but other than that, where?
Plus if these things hit 40-60 inches..that pretty much boots plasma out the door too.
I am only worried that since OLED will junk such a big area of displays, manufactuerers will be hesitant to deploy it, or will deploy it expensively and with low supply. The good thing is i guess it only takes one company to do it right, and the prices will come crashing down.
I guess as long as the manufacturers dont jack the prices up too much, i dont see a barrier to wide spread acceptance.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
It's disappointing that the article doesn't say anything about luminous efficacy (lumens per watt). Is it greater than or less than traditional LED's?
From the fact that it's NOT mentioned I'm guessing that it's less, meaning that these are more useful for decorative applications than as a serious source of illumination.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The reflector is an implementation of a fresnel lens, invented in 1822 by a French Physicist named Augustin Fresnel. Initially used in lighthouse lenses, and more recently used in things like overhead projectors and thin magnifying surfaces you see on the back of RVs. The fresnel shape comes from taking the original lens or reflector and cutting it into concentric rings. Then making each ring thinner, but leaving the original curve so that most of the light is reflected in parallel beams.
applied like wallpaper to my walls or ceilings
Maybe they can design them in 1/16 or 1/8 inch sizes to snap together in a way that can be multiplexed. Run your lines on the horizontal and vertical edge and individually address each element in any color.
Maybe a 640x480 grid (expensive, I'm sure) of these things will be useful enough for simple gaming. But only if they change color fast enough. I'd hook a PS2 to it if I could.
These guys are already notorious among wearable developers. Here's why. The bought the patents and designs for the Private Eye HUD from the previous manufacturer, and put it and all of it's relatives out of production. Never mind that they were higher resolution, cheaper, and lower current than any of the competing display solutions, and STILL ARE!
The display technology involved a single strip of extremely high density LEDs packed together in a line, and a vibrating mirror that would scan back and forth as the LEDs blinked to make a picture. Neat technology. Very high contrast, readable in high light conditions.
I spent a year or two hoping they'd come back, but no =:-( They're gone, and _just_ before I managed to get my hands on one.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
No they don't.
If you want red light, then red LEDs are more efficent than creating white light and throwing away the non-red parts,
but as of 2002, low pressure sodium was still the most energy efficent lighting source known to man.
I haven't checked recently, but last year the break down was something like this;
Lumens/Watt Light Source
100-190 low pressure Sodium (HID)
50-150 High pressure Sodium (HID)
60-140 Metal Halides (HID)
20-60 mercury vapor (HID)
85-95 32 watt T8 fluorescent
60-65 standard F40T12 cool white fluorescent
48-60 compact fluorescents
45-55 Super bright Red/Orange LED
35-45 Super bright Green LED
20 T3 tubular halogen
15-25 bright white LED
5-25 Halogen
17 standard 100 watt incandescent
6 incandescent night light bulb (7w)
6w incandescent flashlight bulbs
Of course, LEDs have a lot of other nice features, like toughness, long life, and a better failure mode. (They get dimmer with time, rather than suddenly burning out.)
-- this is not a
getting more than a few thousand hours (operation before half-life) out of the blue is a problem at the moment. And a year is 8760 hours.
PDPs have similar problems with phospor lifetimes differing for RGB, which is why any unused portions of a PDP are sent the average of the rest of the screen's intensity so it all wears evenly.
The white LED is actually a blue LED.
Blue LEDs only came around when the right formulation was engineered.
They emit some ultraviolet light, which finds them an application as white LEDs when surrounded by flourescent material that fills in the rest of the spectrum.
...
How can it be "truely full color" and "make any color possible" when it's only got normal red green and blue LED technology to work with? Although you can mix up quite a lot of colours with these three, you're still fairly limited in what you can produce in terms of the full gamut of the eye. For example, monitors (also obviously using RGB) can only display a certain set of colours that you can see in real life. It can't display a shade of red that's verging on infra red for example, or an extremely deep purple that's almost ultra-violet. It can only display colours which it can "mix" out of red green and blue ie colours which have a wavelength higher than the wavelengh of the red channel and lower than the wavelengh of the blue channel - and even those will be limited by the quality of those individual colours.
:)
Nick...
PS: I speak English English from England, so sorry if me spelling colour correctly offends you