Industrial + Specialty Printing

OLED is an impressive technology that offers capabilities that cannot be had by any other.

By Joseph Fjelstad

Take a trip to the main street of nearly any major town or city in the world at night and your eyes will be treated to a feast of light and color, flashing on and off, beckoning for your attention. Lighted displays came into existence soon after the development of the incandescent electric light bulb. The early versions were crude by today’s standards, but they were effective. All that was needed was to create a pattern of light sockets, screw in the bulbs, and turn on a switch. These were augmented in the 1920s and 1930s up to the present by neon lights bent into shapes to form words and images in the night scene.

Actually, Edison’s idea of getting light on demand from electricity sparked the imaginations of many other inventors, scientists, and experimentalists who followed his exploits. One of note in the early part of the 20th century is Englishman Henry Round, who is credited with discovering electroluminescence in 1907, making the basic technology behind the light-emitting diode (LED) more than a century old. However, it was not until the mid 1920s that O.V. Lossev demonstrated an LED in Soviet Russia. Unfortunately, there was no apparent follow up, so the idea languished.

There was intervening development work on IR devices using the diode principle; however, the visible-spectrum LED did not finally appear on the scene until 1962 when Nick Holonyak invented the first such device, a red LED, earning him the title of Father of the Light-Emitting Diode. In the years that followed, small red LEDs began to appear in a range of consumer products, from wrist watches and hand-held calculators to alphanumeric displays for toys and games, but these simple applications gave no hint as to what was to come in the decades that followed.