One key change to the RGB spectrum of today's high-end displays could make them last a whole 27 times longer than normal.
From light-emitting diode (LED), the display industry has moved on higher to organic light-emitting diode (OLED). The difference between the two is that the emissive electroluminescent layer in an OLED screen is a film of organic compound that emits light in response to an electric current.
Because displays are the first and last thing we see on our coveted devices,whether that's a wafer-thin smartphone or a curved TV, the industry for making the best displays is huge. LG Electronics, for example, will spend more than $8 billion to build a factory producing even more OLED panels to saturate the market by 2018. If the rumors are true that Apple may adopt OLED screens on its next iPhone by then, LG would be in the best place to provide future iPhone displays.
By then, however, a new display technology may be at the forefront of catching more eyeballs and for longer, too. A Plasmon-Coupled Organic Light Emitting Diode (PCOLED) has one marked difference between a typical OLED which gives it a lifespan 27 times longer than that of OLED display.
In a conventional OLED setup, red and green phosphorescent layers are stacked on top of a blue fluorescent layer to produce white light. It's this blue layer that is the weakest link because of poorer efficiency and a shorter lifespan which ultimately limits the overall longevity of a device.
A PCOLED removes the weak blue fluorescent layer and replaces it with a green phosphorescent layer instead along in a reconfigured double metal configuration. This setup still produces a similar white light like the traditional RGB design but with major benefits.
"In the green phosphorescent material, there is actually a blue emission band in addition to the green one, but it is very weak. With the double metal structure, we actually generate more plasmons and shift the probability for emission from the green to the blue band," explains Dr. Ming-Shan Jeng, of the Intelligent Energy-Saving System Division at ITRI.
A discovery made by accident, the new display architecture may just help our screens look better for longer in the future than they do for now today.
Photo: Kārlis Dambrāns | Flickr
