Next gen colour displays comin' at ya

Tosh says it's sorted OLED mass production problems

By Robert Blincoe • Get more from this author

Posted in Business, 30th May 2001 10:43 GMT

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Toshiba has developed the world's first full colour polymer OLED (organic light emitting display).

The prototype is a 2.85-inch display supporting 260,000 colours and a 64-level (6-bit) gray scale.

Tosh expects its OLEDs to go commercial in April 2002.

There are colour OLEDs about - mono-colour or area-colour - but Tosh says these "require vacuum-evaporation technology in the production process, which is unsuitable for the fabrication of large-sized, high-resolution displays on a large mother glass substrate, as required in the TFT production process." You can read more about that here but the vacuum process is not efficient for mass production, according to Toshiba.

Toshiba's OLEDs will initially target cellular phones and small- and medium-sized PDAs, and then medium- and large-sized displays, including high-end portable PCs that requires higher resolution and a gradation surpassing a 64-gray scale.

If you want to check out Toshiba's OLED, visit the Society for Information Display (SID) 2001 at San Jose, California, from June 5 to 7, 2001. ®