Novel Low-Cost Organic Vapor Jet Printing of Striped High-Efficiency Phosphorescent OLEDs for White Lighting
Investigating Organization
Universal Display Corporation
Principal Investigator(s)
Dr. Theodore X. Zhou
Subcontractor
Michigan University
Funding Source
Building Technologies Program/NETL
Award
DOE Share: $2,400,000; Contractor Share: $1,600,000
Contract Period
09/23/04 - 12/31/07
In this program, Universal Display Corporation and the University of Michigan propose to integrate three innovative concepts to meet the DOE's Solid State Lighting (SSL) goals: 1) high-efficiency phosphorescent organic light emitting device (PHOLED™) technology; 2) a white lighting design that is based on a series of red, green and blue OLED stripes; and 3) the use of a novel cost-effective, high rate, mask-less deposition process called organic vapor jet printing (OVJP).
Our PHOLED technology offers up to four-times higher power efficiency than other OLED approaches for general lighting. In this program, we intend to combine continued advances in this PHOLED technology with an innovative striped RGB lighting design to demonstrate a high-efficiency, white lighting source.
Using this background technology, the team will focus on developing and demonstrating the novel cost-effective OVJP process to fabricate these high-efficiency white PHOLED light sources. Because this groundbreaking OVJP process is a direct printing approach that enables the OLED stripes to be printed without a shadow mask, OVJP offers very high material utilization and high throughput without the costs and wastage associated with a shadow mask (i.e., the waste of material that deposits on the shadow mask itself). As a direct printing technique, OVJP also has the potential to offer ultra-high deposition rates (> 1,000 A/sec) for any size or shaped features. As a result, we believe that this proposal will lead to the development of a cost-effective manufacturing solution to produce very high efficiency OLEDs. By comparison to more common ink-jet printing (IJP), OVJP can also produce well-defined patterns without the need to pattern the substrate with wells, and the material set is not limited by viscosity and solvent solubility.
At the completion of this three-year program, we will demonstrate a 6" x 6" white PHOLED lighting panel consisting of fine-featured R, G, and B stripes (200 – 500 um width) with an efficiency exceeding 50 lm/W using OVJP. This project will significantly accelerate DOE's ability to meet its 2015 DOE SSL targets of 70 – 150 lm/W and less than $10 per 1,000 lumens for high CRI lighting (76-90). Coupled with a low cost manufacturing path through OVJP, we expect that this achievement will enable DOE to achieve its 2015 performance goals by the year 2013, two years ahead of schedule.