GE Global Research received a decent amount of coverage last week from its press release touting the "successful demonstration of the world's first roll-to-roll manufactured organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting devices" at the unit's Niskayuna, NY, R&D center.
The OLED (as in liquid polymer LEDs, or PLEDs) R2R process/toolset prototype has its genesis in a GE-sponsored NIST Advanced Technology Program (ATP) award that kicked off in October 2003 and ran through September 2007, with Energy Conversion Devices (ECD) involved as an active participant because of its R2R equipment-making and production knowhow.
Since the emerging flexible/printed/organics electronics (FPOE) sector has become a recurring Chip Shots coverage area--and there seemed to be little or additional reporting on the story in other media outlets (an all-too-common occurrence these days)---I wanted to follow up with Anil Duggal, the manager of GE's advanced tech program in organic electronics who's quoted in the PR. I went through channels to get in touch with Duggal, contacting Todd Alhart, who works in the research group's media relations. Alhart initially agreed to my request and told me to send along my list of questions for Duggal to answer.
Since I had recently interviewed several people for a Small Times feature about coating, deposition, and other manufacturing challenges in FPOE, I went back to my notes from that project and put together some questions for GE.
The list I sent to GE included queries about the pilot line itself (footprint, process modules, throughput, vacuum or nonvacuum, etc.), OLED device specs (cell size, film stack thickness, size/type of substrate), key process development and integration challenges faced in developing the OLED process, key challenges moving forward (particularly with regards to scaling R&D/pilot line to volume manufacturing), challenges of the "handoff" between vacuum and nonvacuum steps in a hybrid process, more info on current process parameters (film thickness and uniformity, defectivity [especially OLED-specific aberrations], surface roughness, reliability/lifetimes, substrate dimensional stability, etc.), approach to barrier/encapsulation, wishlist of improvements in the materials and equipment sets and the supply chain infrastructure they'd like to see, and comments on how ECD's experience and skill sets helped.
As with any attempt to get more technical granularity from a company with a new process or production line, I am not surprised when some companies refuse to discuss certain items, usually for what it sees as "proprietary" or "trade secret" reasons. Since variations on most of the questions posed to GE were answered, sometimes in rich detail, by my contacts for the Small Times article, I still thought I'd get some feedback from the company that Thomas Edison started back in the day in his Menlo Park, NJ, labs, especially on the more innocuous items.
But I was wrong: GE stonewalled me.
After reviewing my list, Alhart responded that "these are all great questions, but the information you are seeking is confidential and not something that we are willing to talk about at this time." When I pushed to see if perhaps there were certain questions that they might respond to, he said, "we're going to have to take a pass on this."
Once he denied my last attempt to extract at least a few replies, one of my first thoughts was, why send out a press release if you have no intention of letting the media follow up on it in a meaningful way?! Isn't that a PR version of bait and switch? "Here's some news...but whatever you do, don't ask us any questions about it!"
I also scratched my head about the lack of transparency of a venture funded by millions of dollars in US taxpayer monies (almost $6.5 million of the $13 million total cost), as part of the late, lamented NIST ATP program.
But then I remembered that I had discussed this very project with one of the people interviewed for the FPOE feature: Vincent "Vin" Cannella, senior scientist with ECD Ovonics and its PV unit, Uni-Solar, which has been working with large-scale, flexible web processing of amorphous-silicon, multilayer, triple-junction solar cells for some 20 years. Although he didn't---and couldn't---go into great detail about GE's OLED R2R, he did share some relevant information about a critical enabling piece of the prototype line.
Speaking about a proprietary air-to-vacuum gas gauge which solves the so-called "handoff" issue, Vin mentioned ECD's work "to develop a process that starts in atmospheric wet coating and goes on to high-vacuum metal deposition, then comes back out of vacuum to atmospheric pressure lamination. The front surface of the web material, the active surface, is not touched at any point in that process until (after) it's laminated."
Here's a few things that Vin shared that didn't end up in the article.
"We have worked with a major company, under a NIST contract, to develop a prototype roll-to-roll manufacturing line for OLEDs." [Sound familiar?!]. While noting he had to be "careful of confidentiality for the other company's process---it's not ECD's process, it's the other company's process," he did say that the company's process "involves, in an OLED, going from OLED deposition to vacuum and back out. ECD used some of its proprietary air-to-vacuum gas gauge technology in the course of that process. It really made the process work---without that, it would have been much, much more difficult to do this roll to roll. I don't know any other easy solution to doing that."
It's not much, but Vin's comments bring at least a few new things to light about the OLED protoype line, which is more than I can say for GE's perplexing nonresponsiveness.
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Comment by GUEST on 2008-03-20 17:22:05
Tom Cheyney, Chip Shots blogger, adds: I've found a GE Research blog post written by Anil Duggal about the R2R OLED project, which sheds a little more light on the news. The link is http://www.grcblog.com/?p=247 |
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