I recently had a chance to travel to Germany to visit with over a dozen companies and attend the Display Forum 2008 trade show. There was much to see and hear, but today let’s focus on my tour of the brand new Center for Organic Materials and Electronic Devices Dresden (COMEDD) facility.

Norbert Hildebrand
Insight Media Analyst

On October 30th, the COMEDD facility had an opening ceremony, which I was able to attend in Dresden, Germany. COMEDD is owned and operated by Fraunhofer IPMS. Two hundred invited guests were in attendance to see how the new facility will be used to manufacture OLED displays, organic lighting products and even organic solar cells.

What was clear from my tour, and subsequent discussions, is that Fraunhofer IPMS feels that they can lead the development of commercialization of these OLED applications, but in order to ensure that the real benefits remain in Europe, manufacturing needs to stay there too.

The trend to establish Dresden as a manufacturing site for advanced displays and related applications is clear. Six weeks earlier, just 5 kilometers away, Plastic Logic dedicated their high volume manufacturing facility that will use organic backplanes on flexible substrates with an electrophoretic front plane using eInk technology. E-book readers are expected in early 2009.

The core of COMEDD is made up of numerous facilities for vacuum coating. For the manufacturing of OLEDs on glass substrates, an innovative coating line for glass and film from Sunic System in South Korea has been installed at COMEDD, in co-operation with Aixtron (see photo of line schematic). This line, with a capacity of up to 13,000 m² (75K Gen2 substrates) per year, makes the production-oriented evaluation of new process concepts, with a subsequent pilot production, possible.

While the line is not fully operational at the moment (the encapsulation part has not been installed), they expect first products in the beginning of 2009.

COMEDD also offers a roll-to-roll coating facility, made by the Dresden based company Von Ardenne Anlagentechnik GmbH, for the development and manufacture of OLED illumination modules on flexible substrates. This will be set up at Fraunhofer FEP, with whom Fraunhofer IPMS also co-operates closely in the development of vacuum coating technology.

In OLED displays, the COMEDD will focus on segmented displays on glass, microdisplays on silicon (partnership with MicroEmissive Displays in Edinburgh, Scotland), and flexible displays on plastic in a separate facility. Lighting products will be made on glass and flexible substrates, with flexible organic solar cells targeted for the longer term.

During subsequent discussions, IPMS used the opportunity to present all their development work on OLEDs. Besides their general lighting products, they also showed components for automotive instrument clusters, an OLED based pico-projector (12.4 x 9.3mm imager size), an OLED on CMOS-based HMD with incorporated camera functionality and a 3D autostereoscopic display (lenticular) with an OLED backlight. This was a great overview of the work going on at OLED technology center. The best part was to see a very impressive compilation of future technologies all on one table.