The commercialization of OLED lighting is one of the most important themes in the industry. At the fifth session of the Shanghai International New Light & New Energy Lighting Forum held on May 11, 2011, the High-Efficiency, Low-Cost, Organic Electronic Lighting and Display Application Subcommittee Dietrich BERTRAM, Director of the Philips Oled Lighting Division, highlighted the technical development roadmap for the commercialization of OLEDs.

According to Guan Wenhui, compared with other light sources, OLED has the biggest advantage because it is a flat solid-state light source with fast response, diffuse light, long life, dimmable light, high light efficiency, transparent light source texture, and strong plasticity of the light source. If you choose a metal or plastic substrate, it will also achieve excellent performance such as flexibility and attractive commercial prospects.

Currently, the light efficiency of OLEDs is rapidly increasing and it is expected to replace the existing incandescent lamps and other conventional light sources in the future. In 2011, the luminous efficiency of white light OLEDs was 25 lm/W at 3000 cd/m2. Luminous efficiency is expected to double every 2-3 years. However, Guan Wenhui also pointed out that when the practical efficiency reaches 140Lm/W, there will be bottlenecks.

As for the color of light, the target for 2010 is a single color and a different shade of white. After 2-3 years, it will gradually become a color adjustable. In terms of flexibility, Guan Wenhui said that current OLEDs are substrates made of glass, and the next step will be to develop thin-film packages that can reduce thicknesses by more than 50%. In the future, flexible substrates will be developed using flexible plastics. OLEDs will have flexibility. The product has been developed in the laboratory and is expected to be commercialized in the next 5-8 years.

In addition, the transparency of the light source is one of the main features of the OLED. At the moment, the OLED looks like a mirror and is opaque. However, it is expected that 3-5 years later, with the development of technology, OLEDs are expected to be transparent in the closed state. In this way, the OLED panel will integrate functions such as lighting and information display.

At the same time, OLEDs have a significant performance advantage. Flexible substrates such as plastic or metal sheets can be used instead of glass substrates to produce flexible displays. Compared with ordinary hard-screen displays, flexible displays have many advantages: they are more resistant to impact, more shock-resistant, lighter in weight, smaller in size, and more convenient to carry, and can therefore adopt a tape-like process similar to a newspaper printing process, which is more costly. Low cost, etc., can meet future display and lighting needs.

Ton van MOL, OLED Lighting Manager at Horst Center in the Netherlands, said that how to reduce the price of OLED products to the extent that they can replace traditional lighting, technically possible methods include: developing R2R production methods using OLEDs to develop large areas, Transparent electrode, deposited layer OLED etc.

One of the important reasons for implementing flexible dot matrix screens is that they involve process problems in the preparation of soft screen displays. The polymer substrate can only withstand processing temperatures below 100° C., and is easily deformed under high temperature conditions. This makes the low-temperature preparation process required for the soft screen conflict with the high-temperature curing process of the insulating layer and the isolation column. In addition, if a relatively poorly flexible metal material is used as a cathode structure in a soft screen, new defects may easily occur in the driving process.