Paul G. Goebel Professor of Engineering Stephen Forrest and his colleagues from the University of Michigan have lengthened the functional lifetime of blue organic light-emitting diodes by a factor of 10, potentially leading to lower power consumption of big-screen televisions and longer battery lives of smartphones.

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In OLED displays, which are found in high-end TVs and smartphone displays, blue OLEDs are used in the trio of basic colors to produce images. The improvement leads to increased efficiencies, from about five percent to 20 percent or better, of blue OLEDs in the devices in the future.

OLEDs are the latest and greatest in television technology, letting television sets be very thin or even curved, with a wider range of viewing angles and minimal blurring of moving objects. Each pixel in the "RGB" displays contain red, blue, and green modules that give off light at varying degrees of brightness to produce any color in the human imagination.

However, not all OLEDs are created equal. Phosphorescent OLEDS, nicknamed PHOLEDs, generate light via a mechanism that has quadrupled efficiency compared to the fluorescent OLEDs. Red and green PHOLEDs are already embedded in new televisions, as well as LG and Samsung smartphones, but the blue ones are still fluorescent.

"Having a blue phosphorescent pixel is an important challenge, but they haven't lived long enough," said Forrest.

He and his team demonstrated the prototype PHOLED in 1998 and the first blue one in 2001.

With the new data, Forrest and his colleagues hope that the longevity of the blue OLEDs is about to change. Efficient blues would extend the battery lives of smartphones and make great cuts in the power consumption of big-screen TVs.

The improvement in the technology would keep the blue from dimming ahead of its red and green counterparts over time.

TagsAMOLED, OLED, LED, Light-emitting diode, TV display, Display, Screen, PHOLED, Blue, green, red