SBIR Phase I: Flexible Printed OLED Displays for Automotive and Ride-Hailing

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is the creation of flexible passenger identification displays for ride-hailing and automotive applications. This is a distinct pain point as many drivers choose the same model cars. Our first application is to solve ride-hailing passenger identification, but this becomes more critical with autonomous vehicles -- the only method of visual communication between an autonomous car and its target passenger will be via display. By helping to enable autonomous fleets of service vehicles, our displays will impart significant societal benefits, including reduced emissions, improved mobility for the elderly and disabled, and fewer traffic accidents. Beyond automotive, researchers estimate that in 2017 there are 20 billion devices connected to the Internet that are not computers, growing to 125 billion by 2025. These will influence many areas, including health and wellness, factory production, public safety, retail, agriculture, homes, and offices. They will enable better resource allocation, predictive maintenance, operations management, worker training, task automation, energy management, and safety. Not all of these ?Internet of Things? devices need displays, but those that do use them for input and information relay ? the exact uses for which our displays are designed. The proposed project will develop roll-to-roll printed passive matrix OLED (PMOLED) display technology. PMOLED displays are built upon a patterned transparent conductive anode that defines the pixels. To date, the only method used in industry to create this anode is photolithography. This is a slow and expensive batch process, but it is the only method that can produce the required results. Our high-resolution printable anode replaces both the incumbent material and the lithographic process to create a continuous roll of plastic covered in OLED anodes that can be loaded into a printing press. This lays the foundation for fully printed displays, fabricated using flexography, the same technique used to print newspapers. Through this work, we will produce fully printed PMOLED display prototypes. These thin, flexible displays will have extremely high contrast while using only 20% of the power required by a backlit LCD, with wide viewing angles for easy readability and flexibility to conform to any surface. If successful, we will be able to print displays 1000 times faster than the industry standard throughput while reducing materials waste by 80%. Such cost savings will make our displays the obvious choice for information display use, especially in design-driven applications. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.