By John McHale
EWING, N.J. — Officials at Universal Display Corp. (UDC) and Luxell Technologies Inc. in Toronto, Ontario, have joined hands to combine UDC's Transparent Organic Light-Emitting Device (TOLED) technology with Luxell's Black Layer to create a new high-contrast, high-efficiency Black Layer organic electroluminescent (OEL) display.
Terms of a technology development and cross-licensing agreement call for Luxell to obtain a royalty-bearing license to UDC's TOLED technology and high efficiency materials for their manufacturing, marketing, and sales of Black Layer OEL displays. UDC will be the licensor of the combined Black Layer OEL technology, and the parties will share in the revenues from such licensing activities, Luxell officials say.
UDC recently won a defense contract to develop a paper-thin, bendable, full-color display for military applications. Officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., contracted UDC engineers to develop their flexible organic light emitting diode (OLED) flat panel display under the agency's new Flexible Display Program.
Experts believe that flexible displays offer several key advantages for military use because they are lighter, thinner, and more rugged than current, non-flexible displays, UDC officials say.
"Flexible flat panel displays offer tremendous benefits to military and commercial markets," says Steven V. Abramson, president and chief operating officer of UDC. "By making displays flexible, manufacturers can conceivably develop products that bend, wrap around another object, or roll up when not in use. The applications for military and consumer uses are then boundless."
Luxell's Black Layer technology reduces reflection and improves contract and clarity of characters and graphics in any light condition, and minimizes washout when users view the display in direct sunlight.
"This is an important relationship for Luxell as UDC is recognized as a significant, technology-rich OEL industry player," says Brian Kennedy, Luxell's president and chief executive officer. "This agreement further advances our strategy to work with key developers in the company's pursuit of establishing Black Layer technology as a standard in the OEL industry."
"Luxell has a strong market position for high-quality, high-contrast electroluminescent displays and is well positioned to participate in the emerging OEL industry," Abramson says.
"In conjunction with UDC's transparent OLED, Luxell's black layer technology has the potential to significantly increase contrast ratio," says Janice Mahon, vice president of technology commercialization at UDC. "This is especially important in high ambient environments where brightness is typically used to compensate for inadequate contrast or discrimination ratio. With an optical interference structure such as Luxell's, we expect that desired contrast (for legibility) could be achieved at more moderate brightness levels and without a costly circular polarizer. More moderate brightness, in turn, leads to less power consumption and longer OLED lifetimes.
"These benefits are highly desirable in military applications, particularly for those displays that must perform in full sunshine," Mahon continues. "These include avionics cockpits and foot soldier electronics."
The transparent, flexible organic light-emitting device uses the basic building blocks of vacuum-deposited, organic small-molecule materials that emit bright light when stimulated electrically. The thin, rugged, lightweight design has the potential to replace or augment a wide variety of existing displays, and to carve out many entirely new display applications.
For more information on Luxell contact Brian Kennedy by phone at 905-206-1708, by e-mail at [email protected], or on the World Wide Web at http://www.luxell.com/. For more information on UDC contact the company by phone at 800-599-4426, by e-mail at [email protected]/.
