Dresden 2006 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DS: Dünne Schichten

DS 5: Internal Symposium “Functional thin films - future applications and challenges”

DS 5.4: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 27. März 2006, 16:30–17:15, GER 37

OLEDs: Organic thin film devices for displays and lighting — •Ralph Paetzold, Arvid Hunze, and Joachim Wecker — Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, Erlangen, Germany

Organic materials can be used to fabricate e.g. electronic circuits, solar cells, light sensors, memory cells and light emitting diodes. Because of their huge market potential especially organic LEDs (OLEDs) are very attractive. Only about 10 years after the feasibility of OLEDs had been demonstrated in 1987 the first product entered the market in car radios. Today monochrome and full color OLED-displays can be found in many applications substituting established flat panel display technologies like TFT-LCDs. This is a consequence of their outstanding attributes: They are self-emissive, thin, video-capable and in addition they show a wide temperature operation range and allow a viewing angle of nearly 180^∘ in conjunction with a low power consumption. As performance has steadily increased over the last years, today OLEDs are also under investigation as next generation light sources. In contrast to inorganic LEDs, they can be built as 2-dimensional flat area light sources that are lightweight, color tuneable, and potentially cheap. This will open up new degrees of freedom in design leading also to completely new applications.

In this contribution we will first introduce the basic principle of OLEDs with a focus on the physical processes that lead to light generation in thin organic films. An overview will be given on the main technologies used to build OLEDs and the current status OLED development is illustrated. The last part focuses on the challenges that have to be overcome to enable a sustainable success in the display and lighting markets.