The OLED (organic light emitting diode) technology has been known around for quite a while and lately its presence in the consumer products has been felt more intensively, though at a slower pace due to the costly manufacturing process.
It is a matter of time before all of this will change. Experts at the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT in Aachen, Germany have discovered a new method to advantageously manufacture the OLED that could make them cheaper and thus suitable for mass market.
The innovative process is developed in partnership with Philips and consists particularly in transforming a conventional manufacturing method, which employs energy-intensive evaporation and structuring processes in which a lot of material is deposited in a thin layer, and then removed again, resulting an inhomogeneous fluorescent pattern.
In the new process, only a precisely measured amount of metal is applied. The German researches have embedded extremely fine conductive wires in various surfaces which determine the OLED to uniformly distribute the light throughout the surface. Hence the surface is lit in a continual manner rather than in localized points.
The next step would be developing the lighting technology for inexpensively applying it on a large scale of low-energy consuming products for lighting, including objects and building that double as light sources.
