OLED lighting products could be introduced into market within 3 years, revolutionizing lighting as we know it. Two days ago, Konica Minolta (KM) and the General Electric Company (GE) announced they had signed a strategic alliance agreement to accelerate the development and commercialization of OLED devices for lighting applications to meet this goal.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

OLED lighting products could be introduced into market within 3 years, revolutionizing lighting as we know it. Two days ago, Konica Minolta (KM) and the General Electric Company (GE) announced they had signed a strategic alliance agreement to accelerate the development and commercialization of OLED devices for lighting applications to meet this goal.

Lighting with organic LEDs (OLEDs) has been confined to R&D labs, with researchers wrestling with some of the same issues that confront OLEDs used for display purposes - notably lifetime and efficiency - but that’s changing.

Conventional LEDs - although "conventional" is hardly the right word for these impressively re-engineered devices - produce intense light at high efficiency from small packages. OLEDs on the other hand, can produce light from flexible, thin, lightweight sheets. Noting these attributes, Masatoshi Matsuzaki, President of the Konica Minolta Technology Center, said "Having such unprecedented attractive features…, OLED lighting is considered one of the most promising new business opportunities for us in the future."

Last June, KM announced it had developed a white OLED with a luminous efficiency of 64 lumens per watt at 1,000 candelas per square meter - a luminance appropriate for lighting applications. This efficiency set a record at the time.

In 2004, GE researchers demonstrated a 24×24-inch OLED panel that produced 1,200 lumens with a luminous efficiency similar to that of incandescent bulbs. Since then, the luminous efficiency has more than doubled. GE says its device architecture is scalable to large areas and can be produced cost-effectively using roll-to-roll manufacturing processes.

GE Consumer & Industrial Vice President Michael Petras said, "Because OLED lighting is soft and diffused, it will create some exciting application opportunities for designers and specifiers. The applications are numerous, ranging from ceiling lighting for office and residential applications to interior automotive and aircraft lighting to many specialty lighting applications such as task lighting, sign and various forms of interior retail lighting." GE’s effort will be centered at GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York (www.ge.com/research).

Stephen Forrest, one of the inventors of phosphorescent OLED technology that multiplied the maximum luminous efficiency of OLEDs by a factor of four, and now VP of Research at the University of Michigan, has told Insight Media that he intends to devote the remainder of his research career to the development of OLED lighting because of the global importance of developing more efficient lighting sources. Forrest’s lab is now producing OLED light sources with a luminous efficiency of about 30 lumens per watt, twice that of incandescent lamps, and expects to see 50 or 60 soon.

So why is the KM efficiency about twice that of GE and University of Michigan results? What exactly are KM and GE bringing to the table and how will they more rapidly commercialize OLED lighting? Good questions to ask, but we don’t have the answers - not yet anyway. For this, you will have to read about in the next issue of Insight Media’s Projection Monthly with Flat Panel Coverage or Mobile Display Report.

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