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GE Reaches OLED Milestone
swordboy writes "General Electric recently announced the largest and most efficient OLED panel ever created. The 24 inch square panel emits 1200 lumens with a power consumption of about 80 watts - on par with today's incandescent bulbs. This represents the first fruit from the NIST project with ECD Ovonics. The ultimate goal is a cheap, flexible display and lighting technology that can function with an efficiency of 100 lumens per watt. This would make great wallpaper." (And, I hope, a great backlight for laptops.)
This would make great wallpaper."
;-)
I can't wait to play Doom in a real house
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Please explain... does this mean they spray pesticides on regular LEDs?
I think it would make great contact lenses!
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Well, there is "no market" or "clamor" for consumer grade 10 gigahertz processors, or terabyte hard disks, but thats not going to stop research into faster processors and larger hard drives. Microsoft might be laughing themselves till they pee and patting themselves on the back for coming up with that "innovation" line, but it does actually happen now and then. And no market for low power LCD displays? Are you insane? With todays laptops you're lucky if you break 2 hours of battery life. A lot of that is powering that backlight behind the display. Cutting the power the display takes will do wonders for battery life. And that there is a market for.
Don't these things use much less power? Especially since you don't need a backlight? These things would certainly fill a rather large niche, and they could actually end up replacing LCDs where power consumption is key. I think.
means that it is still a long long wait..
The ultimate goal is to create sheets of paper-thin lighting devices that can be applied to surfaces in a similar way to wallpapering. Moving forward, in order to accomplish this and bring the product to market, GE needs to make the device even more efficient - eventually reach 100 lumens per watt - as well as develop a low-cost production system.
Hey, that's my password you are typing
Well, if there were no market and no clamor it would be called basic research. Often people can't figure out the use for things until after they exist. For example, lasers - when lasers were invented nobody had a good idea of what they would be used for. Today, they're ubiquitous. Likewise, regular LEDs. At one point HP was trying to decide whether they should continue research on LEDs. Marketing said "no - you'll never be able to have them compete with little lightbulbs" Bill Hewlett said "Go do it" and made a huge market for HP
However, in this case, the uses are obvious - back lights for LCD screens come to mind immediately. Replacements for basic lightbulbs as well. LEDs are currently produced as little specks. In order to replace a high wattage bulb you have to team a number of them together. This is expensive. This process would turn out SHEETS of light emitting material. Also, efficiency. Current lightbulbs (and the prototype panel) produce about 15 lumens per watt - they expect to push the technology to 100 lumens per watt. This, coupled with longevity and a low cost to manufacture will drive existing lightbulbs and compact flourescents off the market. There are gaps that exist that the technology is filling
...no discernable market and no clamor for such a technology.
Ask any architect or interior decorator about the possibilities of light sources which can be embedded in ceilings and walls.
There's your market, right there.
.: Max Romantschuk
And, I hope, a great backlight for laptops.
Actually, they would make up the main part of the screen assembly. OLEDs show color, as well as producing light (hence there will no longer be a need for a backlight).
That's good that they are winning the efficiency battle, but if "OLEDs begin to fade after 3,000-to-4,000 hours" vs LCDs which "generally have a life expectancy of around 100,000 hours", then we are still very much in the interesting-but-not-quite-useable stage as far as computing is concerned. However, they seem to be fine as light bulb replacements, especially if production costs are low. Note that my figures are from an article from August 2003. Anyone have more recent statistics?
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
One of the main problems with OLEDs it that they begin to fade after 10,000 hrs or so. Any ideas on how long this panel lasts? The PR piece makes it sound like the only outstanding problems are making it "cheaper" and increasing its output per watt.
Does this remind anyone of Fahrenheit 451 at all? The houses in the book had walls that were actually like TV's. I can imagine an array of LCD panels that are backlit via this type of technology being used as a wall TV. Imagine [insert FPS of your choice] on a small wall, say 15'x10'...
Flourescents easily put out 60 to 90 lumens per watt. Low Pressure Sodium lamps of the sort used for outdoor lighting put out around 180 lumens per watt. So remind me again why NIST is spending our tax dollars developing OLEDs?
-Erik -- --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
Edison's first bulb >>> 1.4 lumens per watt
s /L B26efficient.htm
Modern 60 Watt bulb >>> 960 lumens
from here
http://www.ysartglass.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Bulb
.
OLEDs die.
I was under the assumption that this was the main reason holding OLED displays back. Now it would seem that the panel described here is only for lighting purposes (white light only, no colors or even pixels for that matter), but presumably it will still die or at least dim after a few thousand hours of use.
I recognize that this is not a major problem with cell phone displays and such, but if you plan on building the lighting of your house with these, you won't be too happy if next year or the year after that you get only 300 lumens instead of the promised 1200.
No market? No clamor? Good Lord man, people have been dreaming of inexpensive, high efficiency, nealy infinite lifetime, luminous panels for many, many decades.
In the book that I oft make reference to, Your Engineered House, published in 1964, a book which in many respects advocates older "technologies" as being the most suitable to to the task of supplying housing, he looks forward to a day when luminous panels might be available, as they provide the ultimate engineering solution to indoor lighting ( the light fixture in the center of the room/ceiling being the least desirable means, and yet the most prevelant).
Not to mention the possible application of such, buy using RGB OLEDs, to visual displays. Your laptop, your TV, etc, all cheap, efficient, and nearly indestructable.
And, or course, the advent of the "visual wall display" so often used in Science Fiction stories.
No discernable market or clamor for such a technology? Man, you seriously havn't been paying attention.
KFG
A 100 watt incanscent light bulb puts out about 1600 lumens. or ~16 Lumen/watt
OLED 1200l/80w = 15 Lumen/watt
A compact florescent is ~1750l/29w = 60 Lumen/watt
cold cathode tubes are at about 65l/w
So these OLEDs have a long way to go effieciency wise before we get them in our portable computers.
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Often, one has to stop and think where we are with technology, and how far we've come. Considering that this seemingly "advanced" bulb is ages away from the prototypes of Edison and Swan and to think where we will be (or where our grandchildren will be), in another 100 years from now, is fascinating.
The semiconductor industry hadthe same liftime problems in its development of Gallium, Germanum and Silicon as substrates. This was found to be a problem of controlling impurities in a precise manner. Oxygen is usually the culprit. Same for Organic Semiconductors (OLED) tech.
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Sounds to me like they've got it about right.
One of life's lessons: Its always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Yes, but in a TFT display you lose close to 90% of your light to the TFT and Liquid Crystal panel. So if your backlights efficiency is 60 lumen/W the total display efficiency is more like 6 lumen/W, even neglecting the the power consumption for the panel..
The fact that you don't need a backlight anymore makes it not only more energy efficient, but also a lot thinner.
They are already used in some mobile phones.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
I wonder how much coal, water and other materials are required to create one clean 80W monitor ;).
I remember seeing an HDR display at siggraph, it was 30 times brighter than any commercially available display technology while producing a black that is 10 times darker. They used an array of bright LEDs behind the monitor.
..the ratio is 60,000:1 from the darkest to the lightest portion of the screen. Compare this to the 600:1 contrast ratio LCD monitors that are offered currently.
If you don't know anything about HDR, check out this information from Siggraph 2003.
Soon, you may not want to render directly into the sun, you may go blind.
The 24 inch square panel emits 1200 lumens with a power consumption of about 80 watts ... This would make great wallpaper.
Let's see, 20W per square foot... 160W per foot of wall (assuming 8' ceilings)... that's around 5kW just for an 8' x 8' room.
They'll need to get the power consumption way down before this is useful for wallpaper.
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Organic Semiconductor tech can use self-organizing and/or assembling nanotech procedures. This uses water and other raws. Using rather than fighting physical self-organizing trends of our Universe seems like a good approach. Don't fight Entropy - Use it.
More succinctly: dont't fight Thermodymanics, use it.
Why do GE get all proud about this phrase "with a power consumption of about 80 watts - on par with today's incandescent bulbs". Today's incandescent bulbs which are about 5 times less efficient than compact fluorescents, well hurray hurray for GE, I can't wait until they announce "a new xyz processor on a par with todays 486".
but 75000 lumens would seem to be a bit overdoing it for a 8'x8' room.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
--
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
Can you say daylight stealth? Cover the bottom of a military jet or helicopter with OLED panels, then emit the same color as the surrounding sky. Or tanks. Or ships. Or....
Kodak, for one, has a fairly new camera with a pretty big (for a camera) OLED display, not to mention a 10x optical lens.
Anti-gravity? That was *my* little secret! But I never patented it! Boy, was *that* dumb!
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-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
but I don't see how your observation detracts from the parent posters point. Unless the "light box" (I don't know the technical term) that converts the cylindrical CCFL source into one big flat 2D source via diffusion is incredibly lossy you're still dealing with the efficiency of the source itself. LCDs are light shutters. Their emissive efficiency depends on the source of white light. The advantage of tacking light emissive wallpaper on the back of an LCD would lie in its relative simplicity, lighter weight, lack of a high volta ge inverter/ballast, and thinner depth. Until OLED bulb-paper can match the power efficiency of the current design it offers no advantage whatsoever. 6 L/W wont cut it just because it's flat. You'll either get 1/10th the brightness or 1/10 the battery life.
It says 80 watts. You think that might mean something?
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A H7 halogen headlight bulb, which draws 55 Watts of power at ~13 V, produces 1700 lumens. This is at the forefront of incandescent efficiency, producing 31 lumens per Watt, in a capsule that is about 1/2" x 1/4". This OLED is half as efficient, power consumption wise, and ~1/6500 as intense.
When you compare it to gaseous plasma lighting, it looks even worse. A DS2 HID bulb produces ~3100 lumens at 35 Watts. This is about 90 lumens/Watt, almost six times more efficient and nearly 48,000 times as intense.
I realize that these automotive bulbs are designed for something completely different than the OLED panels, but you have to compare these disparate technologies to assess how far the developing technology has to go, to be economically feasible. The reason I brought up the arc lamp, is because it is similar technology to the cold cathode lamps used for current laptop backlighting. True, an OLED display doesn't need backlighting, but it would have to be both more cost and power efficient than the conventional LCD + cold cathode lamp to displace the established technology. With the current state of this technology, it appears as though it still has a very long way to go, just to catch-up to the status quo.
I'm sure that there will be a company that will throw something similar to this into a laptop soon, and people will buy them because it is new and different. Will it be considered better?
Geek 1: "I have this new type of display, that's better than yours because it's OLED"
Geek 2: "Is it on? Why is it so dim?"
Geek 1: "It doesn't need a backlight like yours does and I can read it fine in the dark!"
Geek 2: "It feels like it's radiating heat."
Geek 1: "Yeah maybe, but that might be the 5.7 GHz. Xeon processor. Your laptop doesn't have that!"
Geek 2: "You're right, but I don't need to plug my laptop in all of the time."
With the geek laptops out there like the Alienware ones, I'm sure that the groundwork of expecting a laptop to be tethered to a wall socket has been well laid.
-- Len
What really matters is that the energy will divide 3 ways, heat (bad), out of band light (UV, very bad, IR just bad) and visible light. (For the pedantic, there may also be a trace of acoustic or RF emissions, but in either case a small fraction of a watt would have such nuisance value that it would not be allowed.) You need to know what fraction of the energy is visible, and the spectral distribution, is it white or an aceptable approximation?
AFAIK, a normal LED can get to about 22% (depending on colour) while a high-efficiency fluorescent can get about 70%, but these figures will have changed since my brain had its last update.
There will be a definite limit imposed by the laws of physics, normal LEDs are hitting this now, and despite what one may read in the press, will not ever replace fluorescents for general lighting. They are not even appropriate for bicycle headlights, for which they are sold, and are utterly inappropraite for car headlights, despite the best efforts of one of the more incompetent European lighting manufacturers. In both cases an optimised gas discharge source of some sort (i.e. fluorescent) would be best, preferably not like these vile headlights with the excessive UV content used by BMW, which surprisingly has not yet landed them in court. (It will.....) In fact they are struggling to get double the efficiency of quartz-halogen, which is only a bit better than normal tungsten. I don't know the physics of an OLED, but it will have a definite limit, and I suspect will not be particularly impressive.
Factor in cost and life, and general use of these things will be a long way off, none of which is intended to denigrate the good work which has gone into the concept in any way. Research like this should be done, the mistake is to allow the marketing men to create expectations which cannot be satisfied due to the physics.
I will be sticking to the highest efficiency miniature fluorescents for my domestic lighting, probably for a long time, but when something which is actually better comes along, I will make the change willingly. It was a no-brainer to replace ordinary tungsten bulbs with fluorescents, it will need a bit of thought next time, because there is not nearly as much scope left for efficiency improvement, since you can't get to 100%.
The strange thing is that if you made the screen from LEDs, with a miniature lens on each pixel so the light goes mostly where it is wanted, the efficiency would be more than double that of the LCD plus backlight!
Has technology taken a wrong turn here, I wonder.
The problem with using LEDs simplistically is that without the lens, the light output is Lambertian, so a lot of it goes where it is not wanted, straying into adjacent pixels that are supposed to be dark for a start.
There has been much talk of ferroelectric and other new forms of display, these like LCD are based on blocking the light rather than controlling its creation, however they might manage better efficiency. But with a single white light source, you still need to divide it unequally into three colours by selective filtering, so two thirds (very roughly) is gone for a start. Now, if you can integrate the pixels on top of dots of colour phosphor which emit only light of the colour relevant to the pixel, you might get a very good improvement, but it would mean integrating the backlight and the LCD in one structure. Also, the surface area of a large flat fluorescent would kill its efficiency, I think. (In the above, I mean sub-pixels, i.e. the red, green or blue, not the pixel, which effectively can take any colour.)
I expect that something new, and a bit better than what we have now, will eventually come along, and when it does, it will be so obvious that everyone will wonder why it did not happen 10 years ago. Some would-be inventor out there maybe has the answer now, but not the money....
That just isn't true. Liquid crystal display backlighs emit polarized light which all but eliminates wasted light. The issue with LCDs is that the backlight is constantly on, even when a pixel is "dark". Organic light emitting devices (diodes if you prefer) emit a very narrow band of visible light (no IR, UV, etc.) that is tunable, and only consumes energy when a pixel is actually generating light. An LCD also uses colored filters (more wasted light) to generate color displays whereas OLEDs use different emissive species for different colors. If you ever get a chance to see an Alq3 based green OLED in person, you will realize why this technology is promising.
The sticking point for current OLED technology is lifetime. An LCD display can function for years while the best OLED would be lucky to useable after a year or two.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.