Munich, Germany--OSRAM has developed a steel-foil-backed, flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) that reached an efficiency of 32 lm/W—a record value, says the company. The flexible OLED uses a special electrode design and a steel foil substrate with a thickness of approximately 100 micrometers, making it as thin as a sheet of paper. Tests on a large-surface OLED sample with a brightness setting fixed at 1000 cd per square meter were made in an integrating sphere.
"With this research success, OSRAM further underscores its leading position in the field of OLED," said Ulrich Eisele, head of OLED at OSRAM. The head of technology, Thomas Dobbertin, said, "With this sample, we are able to demonstrate that flexible OLED can already be significantly more efficient than halogen lamps. This was only made possible thanks to our ability to transfer our strong competence in the field of vacuum processing of organic functional materials and space saving thin film encapsulation onto flexible OLED."
OSRAM recently achieved 87 lm/W with a conventional glass OLED—almost equivalent to the efficiency of a fluorescent lamp. The first pilot production line for OLED was opened in Regensburg at the end of August. At the same time, the technology is also being deployed in a permanently increasing number of applications. The first solutions in the field of office applications and retail have already been put into operation in Munich and Berlin.
The record results were attained within the context of the grant project TOPAS2012. The joint project of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (grant project number 13N10474) supports the OLED research being done at OSRAM.
SOURCE: OSRAM; www.osram.com/osram_com/News/Trade_Press/LED_OptoSemiconductor/2011/111111_OLED__Record.html
