Technical Insight
Philips ready to mass-produce OLED displays (Opto News)
Philips Mobile Display Systems (MDS), a business group of Philips Components based in Sunnyvale, California, has unveiled production OLED technology suitable for small displays, including cellular phones and pagers. OLED technology holds considerable promise for small display screens. High contrast images are possible with a wide viewing angle, and the displays can be made lightweight and thin in a range of colors. A further benefit is low power consumption, and as OLEDs are self-emissive screens, they do not require backlighting in the manner of LCD screens. Philips MDS says its polymer OLED technology is based on passive-matrix displays consisting of a series of emissive polymer thin films sandwiched between two electrodes. Such displays are cheaper than active matrix displays which employ Si-based thin-film transistors to drive the pixels in large area, high definition video displays and are suitable for basic display requirements (see ). The company s monochrome PolyLEDs can be filtered to produce green, yellow, amber and red with 16 grayscale levels. The power consumption is 90 mW in graphics mode with 80% of the pixels turned on, and 4 mW in standby mode. The resolution is 65 102, which meets basic mobile phone display requirements, and the response time is of the order of microseconds.
