Current Status and Future Prospects of Organic LED Displays

In the past ten years, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology has made rapid progress. It has now reached performance levels that are adequate for the implementation of OLEDs in a variety of display applications with an enormous commercial potential. Meanwhile first products are appearing on the market, such as displays for car-audio applications and backlights for mobile phones and other portable electronic products. Future extension to large-area, full-color graphic screens for computers and televisions is expected and would make full use of the benefits of OLED technology, i.e. displays with an unbeatably wide viewing angle and an extremely short response time. These attributes are hard to achieve with other display technologies. This article gives an introduction into the basics and presents recent progress made with this promising new flat-panel display technology.