What?

Right now, the current standards for OLED output are on track (or even better than, in some cases) with display technology applications.  Thus, the manufactuiring of OLED sources is changing, constantly.  Check out the article at LEDs Magazine, it goes into more detail.

If you’ve been watching the wire lately, you would have noticed a large spike in OLED production, news, and marketing.  From backlights to specialized architectural illumination, OLEDs are trying hard to find their way into the commercial market.  Analysts project that over the next ten years or so, we’ll see a very large spike in their usage and production, especially in the backlighting market.  The chart below shows some of those projected numbers:

According to a report published by NanoMarkets, OLED Lighting Markets 2008, OLED lighting markets will grow from approximately $2.8 million this year to around $6 billion in 2015.  That’s a pretty enormous jump - I hope that the market can live up to the standard to which it’s about to be held.

The second cousin of OLED, the ILED (inorganic LED) is based on a semiconductor design, whereas the OLED is attached to a sheet-type substrate.  ILEDs are most like spotlights, and OLEDs are more like washlights in that respect - manufacturing OLEDs in large format is a major engineering and manufacturing challenege to which an answer is being sought in order to get OLEDs further into the market.  ILEDs are burning the trail into the market for OLEDs, and as soon as certain issues are addressed, we’ll see OLEDs in a more standard capacity for solid state lighting.

An interesting future prediction is what’s going to happen to non-LED sources once OLEDs and ILEDs hit the market in full strength.  From the article at LEDs Magazine:

Most development activity is being targeted at the 1000-nit brightness level, generally considered to be the entry point for general-purpose lighting (an attractive opportunity for OLED lighting simply because the addressable market is so large). About 24 billion light bulbs for general illumination are sold worldwide every year.

But while the demand for lighting will increase as development proceeds in Asia, Africa and Latin America, it also seems likely that fewer bulbs, tubes and lighting arrays will be bought, simply because these lighting products are achieving longer lifetimes. As a result, NanoMarkets expects the addressable market to fall to about 10 billion units by the end of the forecast period. This represents OLED lighting sales for the general-purpose lighting market of about $1.1 m in 2008, growing to almost $2.3 bn in 2015.

I’m very interested in how this technology is going to continue to impact the industry and more specifically, design within the industry.  If you have insight on this subject as it matures, please post in the comments or contact me.

Wait, shouldn’t this be a “Holiday Tree?”  Ha, just kidding.  It’s OLED!

From the press release at GE:

We haven’t quite achieved Rockefeller or National Christmas tree lighting status yet, but we’re well on our way,“ said Anil Duggal, who leads GE’s OLED program. “We hope GE’s OLED tree lighting will inspire and capture people’s imagination during the holidays on the limitless possibilities of this next generation lighting concept.”

”Customers will recognize that while this demonstration was more for holiday spirit and team camaraderie, it does reinforce how far OLED technology has come and how it is poised to revolutionize lighting and interior design,” says John Strainic, global product general manager with GE Consumer & Industrial, which will commercialize OLEDs for businesses and consumers in the coming years.

OLEDs are thin, organic materials sandwiched between two electrodes, which illuminate when an electrical charge is applied. They represent the next evolution in lighting products. Their widespread design capabilities will provide an entirely different way for people to light their homes or businesses. Moreover, OLEDs have the potential to deliver dramatically improved levels of efficiency and environmental performance, while achieving the same quality of illumination found in traditional products in the marketplace today with less electrical power.

Earlier this year, GE scientists achieved a major research milestone by demonstrating the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured OLED lighting devices. This process for producing OLEDs has been likened to a newspaper printing process. Roll-to-roll manufacturing is seen as a key factor to making OLED lighting commercially viable in the general lighting industry.

Duggal said, “We’re making great progress toward hitting the metrics needed to successfully introduce OLED lighting to market. We continue to make steady advances in efficiency, lifetime, and lighting-quality using device structures that can be made with roll-to-roll manufacturing, so that we’ll be able to introduce OLED lighting at an affordable price.”

It looks like GE is going to stop developing incandescent technology.  More specifically, they are ceasing development of their high-efficiency incandescent lamps (HEI’s).  We were going to be seeing an HEI lamp with no mercury and better light quality than that of a CFL, but bans that have been coming as close as 2012 from places like Australia, Canada, and some US states have made GE change their minds.

GE will now be focusing on LED lamps and their OLED brethren.  David Schuellerman from GE said, about their current plans:

GE Consumers & Industrial and GE Global Research have suspended the development of the high-efficiency incandescent lamp (HEI) to place greater focus and investment on what we believe will be the ultimate in energy efficient lighting — light emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). Research and development of these technologies is moving at an impressive pace and will be ready for general lighting in the near future. LEDs and OLEDs used in general lighting are now poised to surpass the projected efficiency levels of HEI, along with other energy-efficient technologies like fluorescent, and have the additional benefits of long life and durability.

Thanks, Clean Technica, for the article!

Green Tech Media Blogs has an interesting article about the new wave of OLED technology and how it is going to play into the future of the lighting industry.  Give it a read.  It’s an interesting foray into the future of the OLED market and process.

A video from Phillips Lighting about some of the uses of the new OLED products currently in development…