Organic light-emitting-diode lighting overview

For organic light-emitting-diode (OLED) lighting to be successful, it is critical that it be properly positioned in the marketplace. It is also critical that both the performance and cost be competitive against other lighting technologies in the selected marketplace. This presentation gives an overview of OLED lighting technology from these perspectives. It shows that OLED lighting products should be positioned as luminaires and not light bulbs, which affects both the performance and price expectations. Laboratory OLED devices already demonstrated efficacies that are more than competitive against luminaires based on other lighting technologies. There is potential for substantial further improvement in efficacy. The greatest opportunities come from light-extraction efficiency improvements and from an improved blue emitting system. There has been great recent progress in the OLED device lifetime. To be acceptable as luminaires, however, OLED may need even more lifetime improvements. Not all the improvements need to come from OLED technology improvement, however. We discuss other means to effectively improve the lifetime of OLED lighting panels and show why there is optimism that, with volume production, OLED lighting can be competitive against other luminaires even on the first-cost basis. (C) 2011 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). [DOI: 10.1117/1.3529412]