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Imagine replacing your big, bulky computer monitor with a sheet of lightweight flexible plastic, made of recycled glass, that can bend and fold like a movie poster? Or maybe pushing a button to turn your car's windshield into a see-through map with real-time visual driving instructions? Thanks to recent advances in so-called organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs), such pie-in-the-sky displays could be hanging on your wall or riding atop your dashboard in as few as five years.
To be sure, this is truly bleeding-edge technology that's barely on the high-tech radar screen. Research company Stanford Resources estimates that the OLED market was a measly $3 million in 1999. But sales of these devices could hit $1 billion by 2006, the researcher says.
Why? OLEDs should prove simpler and cheaper to manufacture than traditional displays. They consume less power and provide equal if not superior image quality compared to contemporary liquid crystal display (LCD) and cathode ray tube (CRT) screens. Also, OLEDs can be made of cast-off materials such as plastic, glass, or even T-shirts. "OLED is in its infancy, but it already shows a much wider range than inorganic technology" like CRTs and even LCD flat screens, says UCLA material-science professor Yang Yang.
PSYCHEDELIC PARTICLES. Here's how an OLED works. When zapped with an electric charge, a superthin film of organic molecules such as carbon, oxygen, or hydrogen emits a photon of a certain color. Stacking these films on top of each other can create a full-color display. These lightweight films can be molded onto plastics, paper, or almost any type of pliable material.
The flexibility eliminates the need for the fragile and heavy glass panels used to keep the liquid crystals in place in today's LCDs. And because OLEDs emit their own light, they don't require a separate backlighting source to illuminate images on the screen. That means OLEDs consume less power.
Furthermore, light-emitting displays are easier on the eyes and much easier to follow in confined spaces such as airplane seats because of the wider range of viewing angles they support. Some OLEDs can be viewed throughout a 170-degree range. That's more than five times better than LCDs, which typically have viewing-angle ranges of only 30 degrees to 35 degrees.
Environmentally, OLEDs are also superior. Conventional, inorganic light-emitting devices are typically made from materials like indium phosphide or gallium arsenide that are expensive to dispose of and highly toxic. Both these substances are costly to handle and also prone to defects when used over large surface areas. In contrast, OLEDs can be made of simple nontoxic organic materials. And engineers can stretch these films over much larger areas with a smaller rate of defects than occurs in conventional displays.
LONGER LIFETIMES. OLEDs do have some drawbacks. Organic films degrade quickly when exposed to air, water, or ultraviolet light. But advances in film casings that protect OLEDs from these elements have now enhanced their stability significantly. "Before, OLEDs lasted a few hundred hours at most, which is not commercially acceptable. But now, lifetimes are in the thousands of hours, which is improvement enough to move to the marketplace" says Larry Dalton, a University of Washington chemistry professor.
With these improved OLED lifetimes, a welter of new products are coming through the development pipeline. Kodak is one company that looks well positioned to cash in on the bonanza with 50 OLED patents. Earlier this year, Kodak and Sanyo Electric introduced a full-color OLED active-matrix display measuring 5.5 inches diagonally. The display is targeted for digital cameras, PDAs, and other handheld electronic devices. "OLEDs will be a dominant force in flat displays," says James C. Stoffel, Kodak's chief technical officer. The Rochester (N.Y.) company has already entered into licensing agreements with Pioneer, Sanyo Electric, TDK, and Nippon Seiki.
Lucent is working on what it calls electronic paper. Its prototype is a 25-square-inch flexible paper-like display. Lucent claims that unlike conventional LCDs, the electronic-paper display is easily readable under both bright and dim lighting conditions. The display draws only one-tenth to one-thousandth the power of an LCD of equivalent size, and the prototype can display both text and simple graphics while being flexed.
EYEGLASS DISPLAYS. "The Holy Grail is the high-content display that's basically a reprintable sheet of electronic paper," says Pierre Wiltzius, Lucent's director of semiconductor physics research. The company is figuring to license the technology within the next five years.
The prize for Universal Display Corp. is in "heads up" displays. These are displays projected onto the windshields of cars, the visors of motorcycle helmets, or even eyeglasses. Universal is developing OLEDs that are transparent when not energized, making it possible to create image viewers on clear plastic or glass mediums. "We call them TOLEDS -- transparent OLEDs -- and we think they will be greatly used as interior display devices for automobiles," says Universal President and CEO Steven V. Abramson, who expects to bring the products to market sometime in the next five years.
Across the Atlantic, England's Cambridge Display Technology is developing OLED patents from Cambridge University. CDT is using inkjet technology to print OLEDs onto large areas of plastic or glass substrates. "With it, you can one day print out large, roll-up TV screens or even wallpaper that can light up," says David Fyfe, CDT's CEO.
Fancy stuff. But for now, expect to see OLEDs more in cell-phone screens and, eventually, PDAs. By 2003, the first commercially available OLED screens on laptop computers could hit the commercial market, some analysts believe. Kodak's Stoffel says OLED panels need to reach lifetimes of 5,000 hours and higher to be viable replacements for laptop LCD displays. OLEDs aren't there yet, but in coming years, you're going to be hearing hear the phrase "it's organic" in your local computer store.
By Darnell Little in Chicago Edited by Alex Salkever
Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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