GE Announces OLED Breakthrough

Research has shown that OLEDs could potentially be made at very low cost because they don’t require expensive semiconductor manufacturing techniques. Ultimate low cost fabrication method would be a continuous roll-to-roll process like what is done in newspaper printing. No one has demonstrated that OLEDs can be made this way. A partner company (Energy Conversion Devices or ECD) with great experience at making roll-to-roll equipment and together we were successful in winning a proposal that we submitted to a government agency (NIST) looking to help fund high risk technology development.

The proposal was to build a research roll-to-roll line and prove that OLEDs could be made on it. We’ve been working to make this happen for the past 4 years. This means that we’ve been working to develop OLED device designs and fabrication processes that are compatible with roll-to-roll processing and to design and build individual equipment modules and then integrate them into a working line. Because this had never been done before, we faced some real technical challenges - especially given our program time constraints that often meant we had to start designing machine modules before we had the device fabrication process completely figured out! Anyway, in the end it all came together and we were successful in making our deliverable. Here’s picture proof that we were able to make OLEDs using our roll-to-roll machine.

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