Plextronics Partners with Holst Centre to Drive OLED Lighting

Plextronics and Holst Centre announced their partnership on shared research toward flexible organic light emitting diode (OLED) lighting and signage.

With its leading expertise in several of the functional materials needed to develop OLEDs, Plextronics complements the Holst Centre’s existing partners. The Plextronics-Holst partnership’s goal is to improve the scaling of lab device performance to large area OLED lighting and signage devices. This is game-changing technology that opens the door to many possible lighting applications in living and working environments.

An OLED device consists of a light-emitting material in between conductive and protective layers. In order to maximize the electrical current running through these layers, hole injection and hole transport layers are needed between the anode and the light-emitting material. For low-cost processing on flexible substrates, the materials to deposit these layers need to be compatible with solution-based roll-to-roll processing.

Plextronics is a leader in the discovery, development and manufacturing of solution-based hole-injection layers and hole-transport layers. It will make its current Plexcore hole injection and hole transport inks available within the Holst Centre research program, and in return, can benefit from the research results for further optimization.

Holst Centre will use the Plexcore inks in its shared research program on Flexible OLED Lighting and Signage to create functional OLED demonstrators, facilitating their characterization and evaluation as it would be applied in a production environment.

“Having Plextronics on board is a major asset to our research program,” Ton van Mol, program manager, Flexible OLED Lighting and Signage at Holst Centre, said. “The company’s unique knowledge perfectly complements the existing expertise in the program. It adds strength to the shared effort aimed at making flexible, affordable and durable OLED lighting commercial products for future lighting solutions.”

“Holst Centre is a leading research institute for printed electronics that is renowned for facilitating partner companies to use the open innovation model. Plextronics will apply the knowledge gained from this work to enhance our Plexcore hole injection and hole transport products used in large area hybrid lighting panel manufacturing today and all solutions processed manufacturing applications under development,” said Mathew Mathai, director, OLED lighting at Plextronics. “We are excited to participate in the OLED Lighting Technical Integration Program with other ecosystem partners to help solve the challenges of scaling OLED lighting.”