Recent progress in flexible OLED displays

Organic light emitting device (OLED) technology has recently been shown to demonstrate excellent performance and cost characteristics for use in numerous flat panel display (FPD) applications. OLED displays emit bright, colorful light with excellent power efficiency, wide viewing angle and video response rates. OLEDs are also demonstrating the requisite environmental robustness for a wide variety of applications. OLED technology is also the first FPD technology with the potential to be highly functional and durable in a flexible format. The use of plastic and other flexible substrate materials offers numerous advantages over commonly used glass substrates, including impact resistance, light weight, thinness and conformability. Currently, OLED displays are being fabricated on rigid substrates, such as glass or silicon wafers. At Universal Display Corporation (UDC), we are developing a new class of flexible OLED displays (FOLEDs). These displays also have extremely low power consumption through the use of electrophosphorescent doped OLEDs. To commercialize FOLED technology, a number of technical issues related to packaging and display processing on flexible substrates need to be addressed. In this paper, we report on our recent results to demonstrate the key technologies that enable the manufacture of power efficient, long-life flexible OLED displays for commercial and military applications.