The light’s fantastic

The light’s fantastic

It is amazing the amount of change in the optoelectronics industry since right before the turn of the century to today. The number of ways to create a moving electronic image has at least quadrupled, high-power lasers are no longer science fiction, and solid-state lighting is poised to eliminate the last vacuum tube from popular culture.

One of the companies leading the way in solid-state lighting, Osram Opto Semiconductors (San Jose, CA), will increase their focus on OLED lighting and drop their pursuit of OLED displays and cease production on their Pictiva passive-matrix devices. OLED development continues to improve performance.

By combining Universal Display’s (Ewing, NJ) phosphorescent OLED materials with low-voltage PIN-OLED technology and doped transport materials, America Bright Optoelectronics (Chino, CA) created with its Novaled technology green (CIE of 0.36, 0.61) bottom-emission PIN OLEDs with more than 200,000 hours at an initial brightness of 1,000 nits.

Promising to improve the display’s face, researchers at Northwestern and Purdue Universities have created transparent transistors and circuits (see Outlook section) using transparent nanowires assembled on a glass or plastic substrate, Another technology that will improve display performance, especially in portable devices, is the self-refreshing pixel technology from TPO Displays (Chunan, Taiwan, China). The tech incorporates the refresh function completely within the pixel itself (see Outlook section).