Vision - September/October 2008 - (Page 24)

tech Speak defining the digital world ] • [ by murray slovick light needed to illuminate the screen. That helps make the displays thinner and require less power, which is especially important for battery-operated devices such as mobile phones, MP3 players and digital cameras. In reproducing video, the response times of plasma displays are fast enough so that the human eye does not see motion lag or blur. Happily, the response rate of OLEDs is even faster than plasma, with update speeds of 0.01milliseconds (ms) or less. By contrast, a typical LCD TV has an average response time of 4 to 8 ms. Because OLED cells respond quickly, they can be fully turned off until needed. Plasma displays, on the other hand, need to keep their pixel cells partially powered to be ready to respond to a signal, so absolute black is difficult to achieve. With an OLED, no light is generated in the dark state, so deep black levels and high contrast values can be obtained. substrate using an inkjet printing process, so, in theory at least, they will eventually be easier to make than LCDs or plasma displays. Printing OLEDs onto flexible substrates also opens the door to future applications such as roll-up newspapers that can update themselves like a PC display. But for now, makers need to clear obstacles such as high labor-intensive production costs and scaling up screen sizes in order to see widespread adoption in such applications as flat-panel TVs. Last year Sony began to sell the world’s first commercial OLED TV, an 11-inch screen, digital model designated XEL-1. The unit measures only 3 mm (an 8th of an inch) at its thinnest point and offers picture quality praised for its contrast, brightness and exceptional color reproduction. You want numbers? Sony says the contrast ratio of the set is a remarkable 1,000,000:1. The XEL-1’s resolution spec is less likely to have you drooling: 940 x 540. Sony plans to mass-produce a 27-inch version followed with a 40-inch version by 2010. One thing’s for sure. OLED development will intensify as major CE companies get into the competition. Here’s a sampling of recent developments: • Samsung SDI plans to boost production of AMOLED displays six-fold by mid-2009, spending $529 million in the process. Samsung SDI introduced 14.1-inch and 31-inch AMOLED prototypes during the 2008 CES, but did not announce volume production plans. Some reports say Samsung plans to mass produce 31-inch OLED panels in the 2009–10 timeframe. • According to Japan’s Sankei Shimbun newspaper, Panasonic plans to sell 37-inch OLED TVs in the next three years. A Matsushita spokesman said the company was considering OLED TVs in the future, but it had not decided on any details. • Hitachi and Canon plan to jointly develop AMOLED panels for digital camera use within two years and plan to construct a new assembly line at Chiba, Japan. • LG Display’s new OLED business department will focus on small product display development and production in the near term, and, in the future, will extend to large OLED displays. You may not be watching an OLED TV yet, but look for the latest technology advances at the 2009 International CES in January. • www.ce.org OLED: New Kid on the Block E companies expect big things from organic LED (OLED) displays and it’s easy to see why. The technology, invented by Kodak engineers in the 1980s, possesses an exceptional package of potential benefits: OLED TVs promise to be thinner, brighter, more power efficient and have better contrast than equivalent LCD or plasma sets. At its most basic, OLEDs are devices comprised of layers of thin organic films sandwiched between two conductors. When an electrical current is applied, it causes the films to emit light. In this way, OLED technology has more Murray Slovick in common with plasma displays than it does with plasma’s rival LCD. Both OLED and plasma generate light themselves via combinations of red, green and blue light emissions, while LCDs work by selectively blocking areas of the backlight to make the images that you see. Like plasma, pictures from OLEDs can be seen equally well from off-axis viewing angles, and unlike LCD, there is no back- David Paul Morris/Getty Images Choose Your Flavor Just as LCDs are available in two flavors— active and passive matrix—so, too, are OLEDs. Simply put, an active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) can be described as a stack of cathode and anode layers on top of a substrate containing thin-film transistor (TFT) circuitry set up in a row-and-column pattern (the matrix) with each transistor individually addressable, thus determining which pixels get turned on to form an image. Active-matrix OLEDs are both more complex and more expensive to manufacture than passive OLEDs, which also have size and resolution issues, so for now passives remain better suited for small-area display applications in handheld devices. The biggest technical hurdle for OLEDs is the limited lifetime of the organic materials, which is lower than flat-panel technologies. Blue organics for flat-panel displays currently have a lifespan of only about 15,000 hours. The reason? Blue is the most energy intensive of the three colors—it requires more energy to deliver equal light brightness than red and green OLED films. Displays in portable products are used intermittently, so the shorter lifespan of OLEDs is less important in these applications. OLEDs can be printed onto any suitable C 24 September/October 2008 http://www.ce.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Vision - September/October 2008

Vision - September/October 2008 Contents Shapiro's Spectrum In this Issue The Economist Visionary C4 Trends Coming to a Neighborhood Near You IPv6: Connecting People and Things Israelis Spend Big on the Latest CE Devices Tech Speak Tech Policy CEA Newsline Going Global Eye on Business Market Insider Just the Stats

Vision - September/October 2008

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