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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?
In other words, it's one thing to demonstrate a prototype product, but an entirely other thing to demonstrate how you actually plan to mass produce that product, which this is!
Of course, it's yet another thing to actually produce your production equipment and drive adoption among manufacturers, but this announement is still one major step beyond most next-gen display announcements (SED, I'm looking at you...).
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
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.
Yep my favorite was when I saw Organic Sea Salt....
Right up there when the Video store had Apollo 13 in the SciFi section.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
you'll either have to buy 'em or deal with the crazed screaming/whining/sulking that will ensue.
That's why my wife won't let me in the cereal isle, and I'm an adult.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
While I'm probably more of a tree-hugger than most Slashdotters, I'm occasionally tempted to start marketing Organic Hemlock Tea ... "The first tea that's guaranteed to reduce your impact on the environment!"
You obviously haven't gotten out of your parents basement, so we know you haven't gotten laid. Therefore, we know you don't have any kids. As such, you have no idea what its like to be at your wits end in the grocery store with your children.
Let me put it in terms that you would understand.
Imagine that you've stayed up for 4 months straight coding some program--but every time it starts to work, it changes and you have to change your code all over again. Then imagine that every time you tried to sleep, your compile failed and you have to sit up all night making sure that it compiles okay. All the while you are running all over the basement to make sure that none of your other compilers are failing either, and lifting them up and down to change out their power supplies.
Got that? Okay. Good. Now imagine that you just want to go to Microcenter to pick up some more Bawls but your laptop is SCREAMING at the top of it's 2" speakers that it wants Serial-ATA. You know that it doesn't use Serial-ATA, but it is just making all kinds of noise, and shaking. Then other people start to look at you and your laptop making such a cacophony, and your bloodshot eyes just roam over them like they are zombies and you are three seconds away from killing everybody within a 50' radius of you.
Oh, and this happens every single time you go to the store. Like clockwork.
You will cave in. You don't know you will, but trust me--and every other parent out there--you will cave, and buy it whatever it wants to just shut it up.
So Yeah. There is no 'Just don't buy it' crap with kids. Someday, if you ever get out of your parents basement, you will know that.
Amazing. I never did that when I was a kid. And if you show them that you won't tolerate it in the first place, it'll stop happening. Promise. Kids aren't stupid, they know what works. They know they'll get what they want if they just keep at it, and there is NO DOWNSIDE to them. No punishment that I hear you implementing, no going without, nothing. Try it... hold them accountable, and they'll act accountably.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.