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ROCHESTER, N.Y., March 31 -- Eastman Kodak Company has been named by Frost and Sullivan as the recipient of the 2008 North American Technology Leadership Award in the field of Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) Display Technology.
The Emerging Technologies Awards are bestowed annually based on a
survey and analysis of companies that have pioneered the development
and introduction of innovative technologies into their markets. The
awards recognize companies for successful technology developments that
are expected to bring significant contributions to their industries in
terms of adoption, change, and competitive posture. Kodak, a pioneer
in the OLED field, is recognized for its knowledge and experience in
the area of device architecture, manufacturing solutions, and
development of OLED materials for Active Matrix OLED (AMOLED)
displays. This award recognizes Kodak as a leader amongst several
major AMOLED display companies worldwide.
"Kodak's goal is to continue to lead the way in AMOLED innovation
and to partner with other leading companies to commercialize this very
promising technology," said Andrew Sculley, General Manager and Vice
President, Kodak's Display Business. "We are thrilled to be recognized
by a well-respected organization such as Frost & Sullivan and we look
forward to proudly displaying this award, and demonstrating our other
OLED advances, in our exhibit at the upcoming Society for Information
Display Conference in Los Angeles, California (May 18th -23rd)."
Highlights of the technical areas pertaining to the award are
summarized below. For greater in-depth technical description
pertaining to Kodak's award, please visit: www.kodak.com/go/display/.
OLED Device Architecture Solutions: Kodak's proprietary approach
to providing highly stable, manufacturable AMOLED displays utilizes a
white emitting OLED architecture. In this method, a four sub-pixel
(RGBW) is utilized, with the color being provided by appropriately
filtering the white emission. Compared to the conventional approach of
pattering the individual RGB emitters, the white-based architecture
offers advantages in manufacturability as well as higher levels of
operational stability and color gamut. In particular, the white-RGBW
(W-RGBW) architecture avoids the differential aging problem commonly
encountered with the direct patterned emitter approach, which
typically results from the more rapid degradation of the blue emitting
sub-pixel (compared to the red and green. Kodak's W-RGBW approach does
not suffer from this problem because Kodak's white emitting structure
is highly stable and the white spectrum does not shift in color during
long term operation. Hence the color emitted by the OLED display
remains constant over time. "Based on years of experience, we believe
that the path to a low-cost, high-performing AMOLED display is through
the use of the WOLED (white-emitting OLED) architecture. The benefits
include scalability, no need for shadow mask, lower manufacturing
cycle time and better production yield. This technology is also
directly applicable for future solid-state lighting applications,"
said Dr. James Buntaine, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President
of Kodak's Display Business.
OLED Manufacturing Solutions: A key benefit of Kodak's approach is
the ability to simplify the fabrication process. Typical RGB OLEDs are
patterned using fine metal masks, which limit the overall processing
size to about half the size of a Gen 4 sized glass plate. Anything
larger usually leads to distortion in the fine metal mask, with
consequent mis-registration of the deposited organic materials. The
W-RGBW approach, on the other hand, does not require fine metal masks
because the white OLED is deposited uniformly across the entire
substrate and the color filters required with the white OLED approach
are patterned using conventional, high-yield photolithography. This
allows the entire process to be scaled-up without any significant
manufacturing obstacles. In fact, modeling indicates that Gen 8 (and
larger) sizes should be achievable.
OLED Yield Improvement Solutions: A challenge often encountered in
OLED displays is the variations in luminance across the emitting
surface caused by non-uniform currents being supplied to the
individual sub-pixels, caused by thin-film-transistor (TFT) related
processing issues. To overcome this, Kodak developed Global Mura
Compensation (GMC) to detect and compensate such irregularities in the
TFTs using an external driver IC. This scheme avoids the requirement
for within-pixel compensation and is a very flexible approach that has
been recognized as a preferred approach by others in the AMOLED
industry.
"Several AMOLED small panel companies are very interested in
learning more about GMC technology in an effort to increase their
production yields and thus provide additional, high quality AMOLED
panels into the market," said Corey Hewitt, Operations/Marketing
Manager and Vice President, Kodak's Display Business. "We have
recently demonstrated this technology's ability in the 3" KODAK ELITE
VISION, the world's thinnest, lightest, portable AMOLED 1-Seg TV."
This product, co-developed by Kodak, LG Display, KAGA Electronics
and Andes Electronics will be available in Japan by the end of March
2008.
Another challenge impacting OLED yield is due to poor OLED
material utilization during manufacturing. Kodak's proprietary Vapor
Injection Source (VIS) technology enables low cost OLED manufacturing
by increasing OLED materials utilization to greater than 50%,
increasing organic deposition rates and thus reducing manufacturing
cycle times (to 2 min or less), and increasing equipment up-time to
greater than 85%. In addition this deposition technology has been
demonstrated at Gen 5 scale and is scalable to Gen 8 and larger
substrates. The technology also enables high yield and easier
manufacturing control due to low degradation multi-component
deposition from a single source, eliminating out of spec depositions
due to incorrect layer compositions or thermal degradation of organic
materials.
Material Development to Fuel Future Growth of OLED Improvements:
Critical to the success of the OLED display industry is the
introduction of improved materials and architectures. Kodak is a
leader in this effort, developing improved materials and architectures
that continue to provide significant advances in AMOLED displays. For
full-color pixilated RGB displays, new materials in development at
Kodak provide outstanding lifetime and power consumption. In
particular, high-efficiency blue and green dopants that reduce the
operating current density; and stable host materials for blue and
green emitters have recently been developed. Also, Electron
Transporting Layer (ETL) and Electron Injection Layer (EIL) materials
have been developed that enable low OLED voltage and high power
efficiency. These materials, in combination with the W-RGBW pixel
architecture provide advanced displays low power consumption, greater
than 100% NTSC x,y color gamut, and are estimated to have a half-life
much greater than 100,000 hours (over 11 years of continuous
operation). Kodak has also been an innovator in the development of
phosphorescent emitting systems.
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