Polymer OLED White Light Development Program

Investigating Organization
OSRAM Opto Semiconductors

Principal Investigator(s)
Alfred Felder, alfred.felder@osram-os.com, (408) 456-4102

Subcontractor
None

Funding Source
Building Technologies Program/NETL

Award
DOE Share: $4,650,000

Contract Period
2/5/04 - 1/31/07

OSRAM-OS is working on a 3-year project to develop, fabricate, and fully characterize a 12-inch x 20-inch OLED white light prototype for DOE. This work is being conducted at the company’s OLED R&D Center in San Jose, CA. OSRAM’s Materials and Device Group is currently working closely with major polymer materials suppliers to develop the polymer emissive technology needed to meet the performance milestones of this project. The Process Development Group is developing the process for fabricating the OLED white light prototype, and the Product Development Group is performing the electrical and optical characterization. This group is also developing the white lighting module including the electronic control for powering the lighting source. Finally, the lighting module will be field tested by Electric Control Systems Division within OSRAM/Sylvania.

The advanced white light prototype will be based on multiple, discrete 2-inch x 3-inch white light devices fabricated on glass substrates. Two approaches for achieving white light from the discrete devices will be pursued in parallel. In the first, the device will use a broadband light-emitting co-polymer for the generation of white light, from either a single large area emitting film, or from a number of segmented light emitting films. In the second approach, the device will use a larger array of color tri-stripes, or tri-segments, of red, green, and blue polymer emitters combined with a light diffuser to produce white light.

Currently Osram is developing, together with their materials partners, white emitting co-polymers which deliver more than 6 lm/W at 300 nits with a device half-life of more than 1000 hours. In parallel, OSRAM has been developing red, green and blue conjugated polymer solutions to be used for ink jet printing the light emitting segments. Over the next two years in order to improve efficiencies, Osram will also investigate the use of light extraction techniques and the use of molecularly dispersed triplet emitters.
In the third year of the program OSRAM-OS expects to produce a color-balanced OLED white light source with luminous efficacy of 20 lm/W at 800 nits, and achieve an operating half-life of 3,000 hours.

Content dated 2/08