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The high manufacturing cost of OLED lighting is a major barrier to the growth of the emerging OLED lighting industry. OLEDWorks is developing high-performance deposition technology that addresses two major aspects of this manufacturing cost: the expense of organic materials per area of useable product, and the depreciation of equipment. The goals are to achieve a material-usage efficiency of 60% and a total accumulated cycle time of 60 seconds for depositing materials for typical layers. 

To date, OLEDWorks has completed the design of all system components: vaporizer chamber, production nozzle, and interconnecting elements. The system controls required for testing and debugging the systems are completed. Connected to a research coater, the vaporizer chamber successfully demonstrated the ability to make high-performing OLEDs, and to produce and control organic vapor generation with high precision over a wide range of deposition rates.

OLEDs were fabricated using the new vaporizer for both hosts and dopants. At the same time, control devices were made using the same materials from research point sources. The devices made with vapor from the new vaporizer had the same performance as the control devices in terms of efficiency, voltage, emission spectra, and lifetime. The nozzle for distributing the vapor across the width of the glass has been engineered, designed, and built, and software to control the system and integrate it with the existing machine controls has been written. The nozzle and vapor generator have been connected and are undergoing testing. Initial results show the widthwise uniformity of deposition thickness is within a range of +/-3%, successfully meeting the target over a range of deposition rates. Testing is underway to make OLEDs in the production machine using single-component layers deposited from the new source. (September 2015)