Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) and its application to lighting devices

Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) is an emerging technology as one of the strong candidates for next generation solid state lighting with various advantages such as thin flat shape, no UV emission and environmental benefits. At this moment, OLED still has a lot of issues to be solved before widely used as lighting devices. Nonetheless, typical properties of OLED, such as efficiency and lifetime, have been recently made great progress. For example, a green phosphorescent OLED with over 100 lm/W and a red fluorescent OLED with an estimated half decay time of over 100,000 h at 1,000 cd/m² were reported. Large area, white OLEDs with long lifetime were also demonstrated. In this way, some of the issues are going to be steadily overcome. In this publication, we will present a phosphorescent white OLED with a high luminous efficiency of 46 lm/W and an external quantum efficiency of 20.6 percent observed at 100 cd/m². This device achieves a luminous efficiency of 62.8 lm/W with a light-outcoupling film attached on the glass substrate. This is one of the highest values so far reported for white OLEDs. And we will also show a color-tunable stacked OLED with improved emission characteristics. This device minimizes a viewing angle dependence of the emission spectra and has color tunability from white to reddish-white. These technologies will be applied to OLED lighting.