Proceedings Article | 12 September 2006
KEYWORDS: OLED lighting, Organic light emitting diodes, Light sources and illumination, Connectors, RGB color model, Manufacturing, Electronic components, Control systems, Amplifiers, Interfaces
OLED technology may be excellently suitable for lighting applications by combining high efficiency, cost effective
manufacturing and the use of low cost materials. Certain issues remain to be solved so far, including OLED brightness,
color, lifetime, large area uniformity and encapsulation. Another aspect, that might be capable in addressing some of the
mentioned issues, is OLED lighting electrical driving.
We report on the design of a driving platform for OLED lighting test panels or substrates. It is intended for being a test
environment for lighting substrates as well as demonstration/presentation environment. It is based on a 128-channel
passive-matrix driver/controller ASIC OC2. Its key component is an MSP430-compatible 16-bit micro-controller core
including embedded Flash memory (program), EEPROM (parameter), and RAM (data memory). A significant feature of
the device is an electronic approach for improving the lifetime/uniformity behavior of connected OLED. The embedded
micro-controller is the key to the high versatility of OC2, since by firmware modification it can be adapted to various
applications and conditions. Here its application for an OLED lighting driving platform is presented. Major features of
this platform are PC-control mode (via USB interface), stand-alone mode (no external control necessary, just power
supply), on-board OLED panel parameter storage, flat geometry of OLED lighting panel carrier (board), AC and DC
driving regimes, adjustable reverse voltage, dedicated user SW (PC/Windows-based), sub-tile patterning and single sub-tile
control, combination of multiple channels for increasing driving current. This publication contains results of the
project "High Brightness OLEDs for ICT & Next Generation Lighting Applications" (OLLA), funded by the European
Commission.
