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Printing Up The Future Of Light

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The Associated Press

Published: October 13, 2008

NISKAYUNA, N.Y. - On a bank of the Mohawk River, a windowless industrial building of corrugated steel hides something that could make floor lamps, bedside lamps, wall sconces and nearly every other household lamp obsolete.

It's a machine that prints lights.

The size of a semitrailer, it coats an 8-inch wide plastic film with chemicals, then seals them with a layer of metal foil. Apply electric current to the resulting sheet, and it lights up with a blue-white glow.

You could tack that sheet to a wall, wrap it around a pillar or even take a translucent version and tape it to your windows. Unlike practically every other source of lighting, you wouldn't need a lamp or conventional fixture for these sheets, though you would need to plug them into an outlet.

The sheets owe their luminance to compounds known as organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. While there are plenty of problems to be worked out with the technology, it's not the dream of a wild-eyed start-up.
OLEDs are beginning to be used in TVs and cell-phone displays, and big names like Siemens are throwing their weight behind the technology to make it a lighting source as well. The OLED printer was made by General Electric Co. on its sprawling research campus in upstate New York, not far from where a GE physicist figured out a practical way to use tungsten metal as the filament in a regular light bulb. That's still used today, nearly a century later.

The invention of the incandescent bulb created the pattern for home lighting: Our light sources are small and bright. Maybe there are a few in the center of the ceiling, and a few in the corners of the room. Because they're too bright to look at, they need to be reflected and diffused with lamp shades and frosted glass.
OLEDs could overturn all that, with broad, diffuse light sources bathing rooms in a gentle glow.

OLED TVs have to become much cheaper (and larger) to become mass-market products, and OLED lights have to be cheaper still. That's the issue GE is tackling with its printer, which dispenses with vacuum deposition in favor of a process not much more complicated than printing a newspaper.

"We're trying to be as low-tech as possible," said Anil Duggal, head of GE's OLED research team.

In the next step, GE plans to build a larger machine that can print panels several feet wide. Its output could be sold commercially as early as 2010, Duggal said, but he acknowledged that's a "very aggressive" goal.

"It's not going to be competitive with fluorescents in 2010," Duggal said.

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