Press Release

OLED100.eu research consortium to spearhead the advancement of OLEDs

OLED100.eu, an integrated research project, has brought together a consortium of experts from leading industry and academic organisations to accelerate the development of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technologies in Europe. It has received €12.5 million funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme to form the technological basis for efficient OLED applications for the general lighting industry in Europe.

The OLED100.eu programme follows the successful OLLA (Organic LEDs for Lighting Applications) programme, which started in 2004 and concluded earlier this year. OLLA created the basis for organic lighting by developing white OLEDs with efficacies of 50.7 lm/W at an initial brightness of 1000 cd/m2 and with lifetimes well above 10.000 hours.

With OLED100.eu, Europe is continuing to invest in the development of organic lighting technologies and moving to specifications required for general lighting applications.

'The European Council has agreed to cut at least 20 per cent in CO2 emissions by 2020 and OLED100.eu is an important initiative to advance the development of energy efficient lighting solutions. Building on the success of OLLA, OLED100.eu will deliver OLEDs with twice the efficiency, 10-times the operational lifetime and 10-times the substrate size. The participation of leading lighting manufacturers like Philips and Osram ensures a rapid transfer of any result into real products,' says Dr. Stefan Grabowski of Philips Research, project manager of OLED100.eu.

OLEDs are emerging as a compelling candidate to replace conventional lighting systems for large area illumination. Organic LEDs are efficient and generate a diffuse, non-glaring illumination with high color rendering. They are flat, thin, and have the potential to serve as efficient large light sources and can be produced on substrates of basically any shape making them highly appealing for designers, manufacturers and consumers.