Insulated blue light-emitting diodes could banish OLED burn-in for good

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(Image credit: Acer)

OLED technology is quickly gaining traction in the PC market and powers some of the best gaming monitors. However, the Achilles heel of OLEDs has always been its burn-in, which inevitably reduces the lifespan of OLED monitors and TVs. No one has been able to fully rectify this issue. However, a new OLED design philosophy created by researchers at the University of Cambridge and reported by Nature has the potential to kill off burn-in for good.

To address this, the University of Cambridge has developed a new OLED design that better controls the light from a blue-light-emitting diode and reduces its power consumption. The blue light-emitting diodes are covalently encapsulated by insulating alkylene straps.

OLED burn-in is generated by the emission of unstable and inefficient light from the blue-light-emitting diode in an OLED display. As a result, putting an insulating material over the blue light diode specifically helps reduce the instability of the blue light protecting the display from potential burn-in issues that could occur.

"Here we introduce a molecular design where ultranarrowband blue emitters are covalently encapsulated by insulating alkylene straps," reads the Cambridge research paper. "Organic light-emitting diodes with simple emissive layers consisting of pristine thermally activated delayed fluorescence hosts doped with encapsulated terminal emitters exhibit negligible external quantum efficiency drops compared with non-doped devices, enabling a maximum external quantum efficiency of 21.5%."

This new "paradigm" shift in OLED technology has several positive knock-on effects that will further simply the manufacturing process of OLED displays. Current OLED displays use several layers of specialized materials to help reduce burn-in effects, but the introduction of insulated blue light-emitting diodes means that many of these layers can be deleted entirely from an OLED display, reducing manufacturing costs. This new design is also more power efficient, which should lead to more power-efficient OLED monitors and TVs in the future.

If this new OLED design change proves successful, OLED displays will finally be free from the burn-in issues the technology has had since its inception. Displays could run practically forever and not succumb to any brightness changes or designs "sticking" to the screen. 

However, this technology is still in the research phase, so it will take time before we see this design methodology shift to the manufacturing phase, where OLED displays are manufactured with this new design in mind.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • The Historical Fidelity
    Interesting, I hope Samsung adopts this for their next gen oled panels.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    putting anything between display and diode makes me question the cost of "blue" as you will be blocking it so it WILL lose some of its color output.
    Reply
  • tennis2
    I read somewhere that there are red and green PHOLEDS, but not blue PHOLEDS until very recently (not in any panels yet).
    Since Samsung QD-OLED panels only use blue OLEDs, I believe this is why they currently have worse burn-in issues than LG OLEDs.

    (someone correct me if I'm wrong)
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    However, a new OLED design philosophy created by researchers at the University of Cambridge and reported by Nature has the potential to kill off burn-in for good.

    Not quite correct. It would be more appropriate to say "increase the durability of the blue sub-pixel to reduce the risk of burn-in to a point where the expected lifespan of the panel then exceeds the typical ownership period under typical use", similar to how early LCDs were prone to burn-in from displaying black bars on the sides and have since been perfected to be all but immune to burn in except in extreme uses.

    This is of course unless it fails to live up to the hype, and will likely depend on the individual TV model's initial capabilities, namely brightness, as to how long it will last.
    Reply
  • The Historical Fidelity
    tennis2 said:
    I read somewhere that there are red and green PHOLEDS, but not blue PHOLEDS until very recently (not in any panels yet).
    Since Samsung QD-OLED panels only use blue OLEDs, I believe this is why they currently have worse burn-in issues than LG OLEDs.

    (someone correct me if I'm wrong)
    You are correct but I remember reading an article of Samsung adopting a new blue oled for their next gen oleds. It promises a much more durable blue oled, so we will see if Samsung can match or exceed LG burn-in in the near future
    Reply
  • parkerthon
    Is this just in testing and not yet proven to be ready for integration? We have minimum five if not ten years I think.
    Reply
  • dk382
    parkerthon said:
    Is this just in testing and not yet proven to be ready for integration? We have minimum five if not ten years I think.
    It has only just been discovered and still exists in labs only. Five years minimum, indeed.

    hotaru251 said:
    putting anything between display and diode makes me question the cost of "blue" as you will be blocking it so it WILL lose some of its color output.
    The paper cites an "external quantum efficiency" (EQE) of 21.5%. EQE is the measure of actual light energy that leaves the device compared to the power put into it. This is more than double the typical EQE of standard fluorescent blue OLED diodes (typically under 10%), so no, I don't think you are losing any color output here.

    Of course, we've seen lots of papers over the years that detail the discovery of new OLED materials with EQEs between 20% and 40%, but we're still stuck with terrible fluorescent blue OLEDs with EQEs of 7% or less sometimes in our actual shipping products. This is one of those fields where promising lab results come every other week, but actual tangible market-ready solutions are still exceptionally rare. High-EQE blue OLED continues to be the golden goose everyone is chasing. If you could use a third of the power for the same light output, that would mean incredible things for product longevity and HDR impressiveness. There is a phosphorescent blue OLED being brought to market in a couple years by Samsung, but even that may not be enough to completely eliminate burn-in concerns
    Reply
  • tennis2
    microLED when?
    Reply