Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania-based Universal Display Corp bills itself as a small company with huge ambitions, and after four years of work, the company has come up with what it calls organic laser technology which it will target at the $30bn worldwide market for computer and television displays. Working with its research partner, the POEMS Princeton Center for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials at Princeton University, Universal has developed an independently controlled, tunable, three-color organic light-emitting device which it says will enable such applications as high-definition television with flat displays that hang on a wall like a painting, and laptop computers with bright displays that consume far less energy. Organic light-emitting diodes use a vertical-stacked pixel architecture that enables independent tuning of color, grayscale and intensity. Each color element – the primary colors red, green and blue – can be continuously and independently varied so that the device can emit any mixture of the constituent colors. By contrast says the company in an article in the current edition of Science magazine standard cathode ray tubes require pixels comprising side by side red, green, blue phosphors: the eye achieves color by fusing the primary shades. Stacked designs result in brighter displays, more intense colors and higher resolutions, say the article’s authors. Carbon-based molecules [organics] do not have to be crystalline to be deposited on a substrate, which enables extraordinarily thin layering and enables us to capture their transparency to radiation. Nearly all the current display market uses cathode ray tube and liquid crystal display technologies. Universal says it believes organic light-emitting diode technology will be seen as the future replacement system for LCDs. Universal, a development stage company which made losses of $1.8m last year, admits that further work is needed before the technology can be used in products. Sounds as if the company will be racing to make it to market before the UK company Cambridge Display Technologies Ltd, which has brought its similar sounding light-emitting polymer technology to a similar stage of development (CI No 2,996).
