Ink Jet Printer Prints OLED Displays

LONDON — Cambridge Display Technology Ltd. (CDT) said it has produced a number of 14-inch diagonal size, full-color displays using ink jet printing.

The use of printing methods to apply polymer organic light emitting diode (P-OLED) display technology at large scale is an important milestone, the company said. The displays were produced at CDT's Technology Development Centre (Cambridge, England) and feature a resolution of 1280 pixels by 768 pixels by RGB, equivalent to almost three million sub-pixels, or over 30 million ink jet drops.

The active matrix panels use an amorphous silicon backplane, and were made using a multi-nozzle approach — up to 128 nozzles — with no interlacing, and are believed to be the first of their kind ever produced.

The development strengthens CDT's view that multi-nozzle ink jet printing is the best approach to achieving scaleability in the manufacture of high quality P-OLED displays.

The panels were produced using printers from the Litrex Corp., a company in which CDT currently has a 50 percent holding.

“It is not easy to produce high quality products when manufacturing a display design for the first time and in very small quantities, so the evident viewing quality and freedom from major defects demonstrated by these panels is especially encouraging,” said David Fyfe, chief executive officer of CDT.