OLEDWORKS LLC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 11c

Description

We must accelerate the growth of OLED lighting significantly in order to realize its promise of expanding Solid-State Lighting (SSL) adoption and energy savings. The major barrier slowing the adoption of OLED lighting today is the cost. Costs will come down by economies-of-scale as volumes grow, and OLED materials should become less expensive as OLED display volumes grow. However, we need innovations to reduce the cost of substrates, encapsulation, and OLED processing. This project addresses all 3 of these barriers. With lower costs, the increased application of OLED lighting will help the DOE reach the predicted energy savings possible from SSL. In this project, OLEDWorks will develop a novel substrate and encapsulation process which will reduce the cost of OLED light by: (1) reducing the cost of the substrate by eliminating the need to pattern the anode layer, (2) reduce the OLED deposition capital equipment cost and process operation cost by cutting the number of different masks in half – with the potential to eliminate the masks altogether, and (3) by increasing the lit area of the panel to get significantly more light per panel. The combination of these three will make the cost of OLED light significantly less, thus reducing the barrier to wider OLED lighting adoption. A key part of the system that will be developed is the application of a relatively new electrical attachment technology to form a hermetic seal around the OLED lighting area. This system will use a robotically controlled production-scale process that has been installed at OLEDWorks in Rochester. This equipment has been used to develop processes and select materials for electrical attachment; and serendipitously, it appears that application of these methods to form hermetical encapsulation on a simpler substrate while producing a narrower unlit width around the panels is possible. During Phase I, the hermetic sealing will be demonstrated on an increasingly challenging set of formats; from simple systems demonstrating the component parts to the fully integrated OLED system. The final result will be a complete proof-of-principle for this novel substrate and encapsulation system. In Phase II, this technology will be scaled up and commercial products developed and launched that use this technology from our Rochester manufacturing facility. With additional work, we believe that the technology will provide the opportunity to completely eliminate masking in the OLED deposition process which will have the remarkable effects of: (1) further reducing the capital cost of OLED deposition equipment and its operating costs, and (2) enabling simple low-cost Roll-to- Roll or Roll-to-Sheet deposition equipment and processes. This will enable significant cost-reduction in bendable OLED lighting, which is expected to unleash creativity and create pull from the lighting design community. OLEDWorks is one of the top two OLED lighting panel makers in the world, and the only US producer. This innovative project will significantly help both OLEDWorks and the OLED lighting industry grow.