CSEM Joins EU Project on Flexible OLEDs

CSEM SA, the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology, has joined a €11.2 million (about $14.7 million) project to help commercialize flexible OLEDs. The project — Flex-o-Fab — will create a pilot-scale manufacturing line for the OLEDs and use it to develop reliable production processes.

Funded through the EU’s 7th Framework Programme and coordinated by the research institute TNO/Holst Centre, Flex-o-Fab includes experts from 11 European companies (Philips, Epigem and Orbotech among them), universities and research organizations with strong backgrounds in organic electronics. The EU portion of the project officially launched Oct. 1, 2012, and will conclude Sept. 30, 2015.

The Flex-o-Fab project aims to take flexible OLEDs (as seen here) from the lab to the fab. The project will demonstrate a reliable manufacturing process for OLED lighting foils, enabling market introduction within three years of the end of the project. Courtesy of ©Holst Centre 2013.

The first OLED products are on the market, but are rigid glass tiles. Flexible OLEDs could open new lighting possibilities and be produced for less money than glass-based ones. They also could be embedded into objects, the project said.

While flexible OLEDs have been successfully lab-demonstrated by many groups (CSEM among them), Flex-o-Fab aims to take OLEDs to the fab by developing reliable processes for manufacturing them on plastic foils. The project will set up a modular, integrated pilot production line and associated manufacturing chain, migrating existing sheet-to-sheet processes to roll-to-roll (R2R) production to lower costs even more and enable high-volume production.

CSEM and a range of partners will contribute to the project by developing new bonding-debonding solutions that eventually will provide a reliable and R2R-compatible method for OLED processing on polymer foils.

For more information, visit: www.csem.ch or www.flexofab.eu