Dupont, better known for their work in creating Teflon, Nylon and Kevlar (to name a few), are now reaching for the next milestone in electronics with low cost OLED manufacturing. The term is a bit of an oxymoron for now: OLED is incredibly expensive and very few manufacturers can afford the extra cost required.
However, Dupont's OLED research has the potential to render our modern plasmas and LCDs downright bulky by comparison in the near future. Their 'Gen 3' OLED materials have given Dupont a head start into providing manufacturers with a future source of low cost OLEDs.
Recently, Sony has been making a bit of fuss about the emergence of OLED as the next big thing in the display business. They already have it in some of their phones and walkman MP3 players. But at those small sizes, you barely notice the OLED effect and advantages.
Sony launched the world's first OLED television recently, but it's only small for now. As soon as OLED gets bigger and a lot cheaper (OLED display products currently cost a small fortune because of the difficult manufacturing process), the hype is that OLED might change the way we view moving pictures.
Dupont, with a decent history in the chemical business, have brought new manufacturing technologies to the way OLEDs are produced. According to a Dupont press release, the Gen 3 blue materials contains color coordinates of 0.14, 0.12 and a current efficiency of 6.0 cd/A, giving it a overall lifetime of 38,000 hour, which would make it one of the longest blue OLED material lifetimes ever produced. And that can only mean big dollars for Dupont.
For more information about how this could change the OLED industry, visit the official Dupont web site. It's possible in the near future that that Dupont could create an OLED product with the throw away cost of a non-stick (Teflon) coated fry pan. But hopefully without the chemical and environmental problems of some of Dupont's past mistakes.