Large area OLED lighting manufacturing

For the next generation of solid state light with high efficiency, low operating voltage and long life time, organic light emitting diodes are promising candidates. The fabrication of large emission area OLEDs for lighting application at reasonable costs is essential to achieve a large market penetration. To reach this target, an improved combination of manufacturing technology has to be established. A key aspect is the OLED scaling to large area without high efficacy loss. Based on the limited conductivity of ITO (Indium-Tin-Oxide) improved current distribution methods have to be developed to achieve a homogeneous large area lighting. We here present such novel designs of metal support line structures which allow large area lighting with small efficacy losses. Highly efficient large area white lighting modules with 25 Im/W efficacy and more than 125 cm² active area will be shown. Based on this lighting integration technology, one of the largest SM-OLED lighting module with 30x30 cm² dimension (subdivided in 4 panels) will be presented. The OLED active area is 510 cm², the light outputs is 160 Lumen. A second key issue is to reduce the cost for the OLED lighting manufacturing. ITO as the most common electrode material has dramatically increased in prices over the last years. We have successfully replaced ITO by TAO (aluminum doped zinc oxide) and PEDOT: PSS new materials for the alternative transparent anode. OLEDs on ZAO substrates show similar efficiencies (power efficiency of 12.3 Im/W at 1000 cd/m²) than OLEDs with ITO (power efficiency 11.6 Im/W at 1000 cd/m²). Also, OLED on PEDOT achieve comparable efficiencies with the OLED on ITO, namely 19.8 Im/W at 1000 cd/m², respectively. Finally, upscaled with OLEDs on ZAO and PEDOT are successfully demonstrated on 10 x 10 cm² substrates. For the OLED on PEDOT, we achieve 11.3 Im/W efficacy on 10 x 10 cm².