OLEDs: The Future of What You See

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The use of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) have been increasing in recent years as the demand for electronic screens and efficient lighting has increased. The first organic LED was invented in the 1950’s and has been researched extensively since then. In the electronics sector, OLED screens have become a common occurrence due to their low power use, which is important in mobile phones, and in televisions where OLEDs can produce the near black images movie buffs demand. Using current manufacturing techniques, OLEDs are set to take the future of what we look at every day to the next level.
The idea behind an organic material which could emit a source of light was first discovered by André Bernanos from the Nancy-Université in the early 1950’s. Bernanos’ work was furthered by Martin Pope at New York University in 1960 where the researchers developed a method to inject an electrode into organic crystals. Under a vacuum, they found that the crystals were electroluminescence when a direct current was applied [1]. These original OLEDs were plagued by the necessarily high voltage required for light to be emitted. This was remedied in 1987 when two researchers, C.W. Tang and S.A. Vandyke, from Eastman-Kodak developed the first diode like device using a two layer design. The design was achieved by using a vapor deposition method to produce the two thin organic layers. Tang and Vandyke’s breakthrough allowed the diodes to emit light for at a much lower operating voltage and the ability for the newly created OLEDs to move from the research lab to the consumer market [2].
OLEDs are very similar to the traditional LED in that they both are considered to be a semiconductor device with either two or three layers of organic material. The...

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...for mobile devices and the lighting in homes and businesses. To make these future lights, manufactures create thin semiconductor films and dope the organic layers with different compounds to generate pixels which can emit different colored light. OLEDs have come a long way since their basic inception in the 1950s and the future only knows how far they will go.

Works Cited

[1] http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jcp/32/1/10.1063/1.1700925
[2] http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/apl/51/12/10.1063/1.98799
[3] http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/oled1.htm
[4] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pola.1266/pdf
[5] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ma011155%2B
[6] Materials Science and Engineering by Callister, 8th Edition
[7] http://www.technologyreview.com/news/521656/ink-jet-printing-could-be-the-key-to- next-generation-oled-displays/

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