At the last Global Material Parts Equipment Tech Fair, Universal Display (UDC), a leading supplier of components for BOE, LG Display, Samsung Display and other manufacturers, announced that they are ready to bring blue phosphorescent material to the market by 2024 colors for OLED panels.
Here it is worth explaining that in full-color panels of OLED TVs, smartphones, tablets and laptops, polymers with different principles of action are used to generate the main RGB color components: phosphorescence and fluorescence.
For green and red, the first type of polymer is used – PHOLED. Their light output, that is, the conditional efficiency, is practically brought to 100%. The blue color is generated by fluorescent polymers, whose maximum light output today does not exceed 25%. Moreover, with an increase in brightness, diodes based on such polymers degrade even more intensively than PHOLEDs.
That is why the first RGB-type OLED panels had a very short “life” with constantly deteriorating color reproduction, and for modern panels, polymers are either superimposed on each other (WOLED) or use only one type in combination with quantum dots (QD-OLED) .
The appearance of diodes with blue phosphorescence and a return close to 100% can drastically change the existing order. For example, QD-OLED panels can potentially become immediately either several times brighter, or much more durable and cheaper. At the same time, panels on white diodes (WOLED) will add 20-25% in brightness, but the very meaning of their existence will become doubtful – there will be no need to mix polymers and use color filters, due to which the overall efficiency of the panels is significantly reduced.
RGB-type panels can also become brighter and more durable. At the same time, the need to use a “layout” of subpixels of the PenTile type will also disappear, because in AMOLED panels it is used, among other things, due to the unequal characteristics of diodes.
It should also be taken into account that with the introduction of such an innovation, the color rendering of OLED panels of all types will also change – an increase in the brightness of blue subpixels will lead to an increase in color temperature and a shift in balance to cold shades. Manufacturers simply cannot help but increase the brightness of blue, because this is what ultimately increases the actual and visual brightness of the entire panel, which is what everyone is trying to achieve. Moreover, the technical capabilities for this are also being developed – Universal Display (UDC) at the same fair announced work on the so-called plasmonic technologies in the production of organic diodes, which “can take the efficiency and service life of phosphorescent OLEDs to a new level.”
