The technology was developed by a private company

May 17, 2010 10:44 GMT  ·  By

Researchers at DuPont Displays announce the development of a new production technique that can be used to manufacture organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) at a large scale. If widely used, the process could lower the price tag of existing OLED TVs considerably. At this point, costs associated with these devices are high because OLED are very difficult to produce on a large scale. But using these diodes carries numerous benefits, including increased energy efficiency and very sharp images, over other types of displays, Technology Review reports.

The private company announces that their method revolves around using a custom-built carbon printer, which is capable of producing large, high-performance OLED televisions at a relatively large scale. Even if this innovation does not fulfill the conditions required to make OLED TVs accessible to most people, it is still being hailed as a major step in the right direction. Japanese manufacturer Dainippon Screen supplies the custom printers, which are reportedly capable of creating a 50-inch TV display in less than 2 minutes.

Testing on the TV sets produced through this method has revealed that the average life span for such a device is around 15 years, and that the quality is the same as that of OLED TVs produced through other methods. “The key question is, when you scale up, does the cost per square inch drop or go up?” explains the President of DuPont Displays, William Feehery. The goal of manufacturers involved in the OLED business is to create products that can compete in terms of costs with liquid-crystal display (LCD) TV sets. But this is not currently happening, as the new equipments are far more expensive.

By printing OLED on substrate, the quality of the finished product generally suffers. This happens because there are several layers of materials in such a display, which need to be clearly defined from each other. The printing process merges these layers into one, and defects can easily occur. The way researchers at DuPont Displays found around this consists in using special inks. The solutions, each designed for a single layer, feature custom-designed molecules that cannot mix with similar molecules in adjacent layers. This means that the layers are clearly separated, and thus the quality of the overall display maintained and even improved.