OLED (organic light emission diode) panels clearly represent the display technology of the future since they provide enhanced color reproduction and contrast (compared to LCDs or PDPs), while at the same time requiring significantly lower amounts of power. The biggest issue right now is to turn these panels more affordable (as far as the manufacturing process is concerned), and it seems that the Japanese company Alps Electric might have made quite an impressive breakthrough in this direction.

As Satoshi Ookubo reports for Nikkei Electronics (TechOn), it appears that the researchers from Alps have developed a polymer OLED panel based on a printing technology. This prototype OLED panel is formed out of the following components: a film substrate, a barrier layer, a getter layer, a cathode electrode, a polymer OLED emission layer, an anode electrode, another barrier layer and another film substrate.

This highly innovative panel features a very thin film substrate on which a getter, in addition to the emission layer and the electrodes, is formed by printing. The printing process can be either gravure printing or inkjet printing, with gravure printing being the choice for more inexpensive materials, while inkjet and other printing methods will be chosen whenever we're talking about more expensive materials.

According to Alps, the light emitted from the emission layer is released to outside from the film substrate on the anode electrode side, with the emission colors being yellow and white. The luminance in both cases is of around 100 cd/m2, while the half-lives of the emission systems are 1,000 hours and 300 hours, respectively.

There's no info on the exact right moment when the first commercial devices using this technology actually arrive on the market or whether this is only an intermediary step in the development of even more advanced OLED panels, but regardless of its ultimate outcome, it will most likely represent a major step in the history of organic LED displays.


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