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GE Announces OLED Manufacturing Breakthrough
bughunter writes "Today GE announced the successful demonstration of the world's first roll-to-roll manufactured organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting devices (press release). This demonstration is a key step toward making OLEDs and other high-performance organic electronics products at dramatically lower costs than what is possible today. The green crowd is thrilled as well. Personally, as the parent of a 3-year-old technophile, I'm dreading the animated cereal boxes." Now can I get my Optimus Keyboard for less than $1,299?
I would be excited ... if there were more details convincing me this is a 'breakthrough.' That word gets thrown around a lot these days.
If the announcement came out of some startup, it would be questionable, but it came from General Electric Research in Schenectady, NY. That's an organization over a century old, and a big chunk of the electrical industry was invented there. If they say they have a production process for making something in quantity, they probably do.
For OLEDs refresh rates aren't a problem, patterning is. I presume this roll to roll technique is for lighting, as lighting panels don't require high precision deposition, just fire on the layers in a big mixture and go. When you move towards displays then you want very precise RGB pixels, patterned in a specific way, and a resolution of HD. For evaporation deposition that requires a shadow mask and 3 separate events for each colour. Shadow masks are a pain.
The reason Sony have only managed an 11" OLED display (and at $1500 they are still making a loss) is due to the difficulties of pattering it all (and getting good consistency). For GE and white light it is much much more straight forward. Whack on the layers, connect it up and go - they don't need to worry about any patterns. In the longer term solution processable OLEDs would substantially improve things. Solution processable means inkjet deposition (just like home printers), which means fine control of deposition and the ability to run with a roll to roll techniques. Solution processability is a few years away, however.