Tackling the “Achilles’ heel” of OLED displays
Flexible smartphones and color-saturated television displays were some highlights at this year’s Consumer Electronics Showcase, held in January in Las Vegas. Many of those displays were made using organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs — semiconducting films about 100 nanometers thick, made of organic compounds and sandwiched between two electrodes, that emit light in response to electricity. This allows each individual pixel of an OLED screen to emit red, green, and blue, without a backlight, to produce more saturated color and use less energy. The film can also be coated onto flexible, plastic substrates. But there’s a reason why these darlings of the showroom are not readily available on shelves: They’re not very cost-effective to make en masse. Now, MIT spinout Kateeva has developed an “inkjet printing” system for OLED displays — based on years of Institute research — that could cut manufacturing costs enough to pave the way for mass-producing flexible and large-screen models. In doing...