Ok, now that we've piqued your curiosity with all this information about OLEDs, you're probably wondering when you can buy a television set with this phenomenal display. The engineer in me takes your question, "When will OLED TV's be available?" and turns it into more questions

• When will the technology be ready? Televisions have requirements for color gamut, resolution, usable life, etc.
• When will the technology be ready to make large displays, i.e. bigger than 27" in diagonal?
• When will the cost be acceptable to the average consumer?

Today, OLEDs are fairly common in small displays for portable electronics, including MP3 players and subdisplays in cell phones. These displays are typically passive matrix OLEDs (PMOLEDs). The annual revenue for PMOLEDs is approximately $500M worldwide. Kodak enables the manufacture of PMOLED display, with licensees numbering more than 15 worldwide.

AMOLEDs are required for television displays, due to their larger size and high-resolution video content. In 2003, Kodak launched the World's First AMOLED Digital Camera, the LS633. Today, OLED televisions are available in small-to-medium sizes from Sony (11-inch XEL-1) and Kodak (ELITE Portable TV).

One of the concerns for OLED technology has been the lifetime of the blue color, which has historically been less than red and green. Over time, this results in very dim blue pixels and shifting of the display toward yellow. Kodak has been developing new architectures to overcome this issue, in particular a very stable White OLED formulation, which can be used in combination with a color filter array to produce a full-color display. Kodak's White OLED architecture boasts a lifetime in excess of 100,000 hours. There are 8,766 hours in a year, so these devices are very stable. Another advantage of the White OLED approach is the elimination color shift over time due to one color dying out more quickly than the others.

Kodak's White OLED technology also meets or exceeds television standards for color gamut, image quality, brightness, contrast ratio and resolution. At the 2008 Society for Information Display (SID) Trade Show, Kodak demonstrated the World's First 100% NTSC White OLED Display showcasing Kodak deep blue. The display received many compliments about its beauty from show attendees.

Conventionally, full-color OLED displays have been fabricated by depositing individual red, green and blue emitters through a precisely aligned mask. The mask is a very thin piece of metal full of holes for the material to pass through to the substrate, similar to an art stencil. Using a precision mask presents many problems for manufacturing large displays, as it becomes exceedingly difficult to make, align and handle the masks as they approach the size of a queen size mattress.

The White OLED process, on the other hand, uses maskless technology, which is scalable to the glass sizes required to make television displays. An integrated color filter array is used, to produce full-color displays. Kodak uses an innovative design, RGBW, where a fourth unfiltered sub pixel is used to reduce the power consumption by ~50% in typical usage.

 

As with all new technologies, the cost is initially high. It takes time to develop new manufacturing methods to lower cost and improve yield. Kodak is pioneering new technologies to improve yield, like Global Mura Compensation (GMC) , and reduce manufacturing cost, like Kodak Vapor Injection Source Technology (VIST). GMC technology has been demonstrated on small displays in the Kodak ELITE Portable TV. The scalability of GMC to larger panels has been proven with the introduction of Kodak's AMOLED Wireless Frame. Our technologies provide the tools necessary to for OLED manufacturers to begin investing in Kodak White OLED technology. This will help bring affordable, large-scale OLED products to the consumer within the next few years.

Do you remember the musical "Fiddler on the Roof"? At one point in the second act, the village is all excited about a newly-married couple's "New Arrival," with everyone stopping by their home to offer congratulations. By the end of the scene, however, you realize that the "New Arrival" in the family isn't a child - but a sewing machine (which can be pretty important if you are trying to set up shop as a tailor, like Motel was).

It's always exciting to welcome a new member of the family - even if that new member isn't a person. And lately, we've been popping some champagne of our own.

Last year, Kodak announced the KODAK KAI-01050 Image Sensor - a 1-megapixel image sensor based on a completely new technology - the KODAK TRUESENSE 5.5 micron Interline Transfer CCD Platform. In September, we announced the KODAK KAI-02150 Image Sensor, extending the use of this platform to a 1080p format device. Now, just a few months later, we are announcing another "New Arrival" to this family - a new 2-megapixel sensor targeted to industrial and applied imaging applications.

Of course, the performance of this new device - the KODAK KAI-02050 Image Sensor -is excellent, providing high-resolution and high-frame rate in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio. But what's really interesting is how all three members of this family share common features that help camera manufacturers bring their products to market more quickly.

KODAK KAI-01050, KAI-02050, and KAI-02150 Image Sensors

Since all of these devices share the same technology platform, their performance is very similar - they all basically respond the same way to light, require the same circuits to operate, and interface into a camera design the same way. That means that before we even ship out the first sample of this new sensor to camera manufacturers, they already have a really good idea of how it is going to perform. And they also know that they will be able to leverage electronics from cameras using the first two sensors in this family to build a camera using the third. 

We even took this a step further by using the same mounting package for all three sensors, standardizing the assignment of the electrical pins, and putting those pins in the same physical locations for each of these devices. That means that a camera designer can build a single electronics board to support all three sensors in this family - the pins from the sensors all line up, the sensor package is the same size, and the circuits will be already in place. And since we reserved one of the pins on the sensor as an "ID" pin, the camera can actually "read" which sensor is plugged in so it can load the right firmware (to drive that particular sensor) when the camera is turned on.

In the end, this is really all about doing a job faster and better. Because we used a common design for this sensor family, it makes it a lot easier for manufacturers to build cameras that use the new devices. That makes cameras available more quickly - so that customers can start taking advantage of the higher resolution, frame rate, and performance these new sensors provide to increase the productivity and efficiency of their work.

Having something new is great. But having it as part of the family is even better.

Just ask Motel, the tailor.

One of the reasons I love working in OLED technology is because it has the potential to reduce the environmental impact of displays.

An important advantage of OLED technology is that no heavy metals are used in fabricating the displays. LCDs commonly rely on compact fluorescent lamps, containing mercury, as a light source. Mercury is toxic to humans and animals. Since OLEDs do not contain mercury, they can reduce the environmental impact of displays and lower disposal and recycling costs.

Green Tip of the Day: Don't throw away your old electronics with LCD displays - there's mercury in that panel!

One of the main attractions of OLED technology, compared with LCD, is that it is a simpler structure. Both OLEDs and LCDs use LTPS TFT substrates, but OLEDs require fewer materials to create a full-color display. Schematics of typical AMOLED and AMLCD displays are shown below. Fewer materials used in OLEDs results in less waste to be disposed of or recycled later!