Peter Clarke Courtesy of EE Times Europe (06/23/2008 6:20 AM EST)

LONDON — CombOLED is a European funded research and development project within the 7th Framework Program of collaborative R&D. The goal of CombOLED is to combine new device structures, advantageous manufacturing approaches and less complex materials with the aim to achieve cost-effective OLED-based lighting.

The project is being led by OSRAM Opto Semiconductors. It began on January 1, 2008 and is due to run for 36 months with a budget of 7 million euro (about $10.9 million). The project did not say how much of that budget will be provided by the European Union but commercial companies have usually been able to claim up to half their costs under EU research rules.

The CombOLED consortium resembles an OLED supply chain from substrate supply via device manufacturing through to application design and prototype realization. The seven partners are located in France, Spain, Italy and Germany.

OLED technology is expected to become a force in a general lighting market that will be worth billions of euros by 2015. These flat light sources have excellent technical characteristics: they last more than 10,000 hours, offer high luminance (1000cd/m2) and have an efficiency of 40 to 60 lm/W, according to project leader Osram,

The CombOLED project is expected to cover cost-effective printing of component architectures for large-format transparent light sources.

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