Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) says that it has dramatically improved the life performance of display devices based on light emitting polymer (LEP) technology, achieving more than 11,000 hours of operation for its blue polymer research devices.

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) says that it has dramatically improved the life performance of display devices based on light emitting polymer (LEP) technology, achieving more than 11,000 hours of operation for its blue polymer research devices. This represents a trebling of lifetime over the past 12 months for the blue research devices. The longer operating life is due to advances in LEP material formulation, improved deposition processes for the polymer and other materials and innovative device structures. CDT says that the improvements in processes and structures are directly transferable to red, green, white and other polymer material colours. CDT expects that many of these improvements will be transferable to full manufacturing processes.
CEO Dr David Fyfe reports: "We focused on the blue material since it is vital to providing the full colour capability essential for mainstream display markets such as television and personal computing along with the exploding market for multimedia-enabled cell phones, PDAs and other mobile products. Even though longer lifetimes are still needed, these results are a significant milestone towards the commercialisation of the LEP technology."

The lifetime is measured as the time from initial brightness to half the initial brightness. The method used is based on the industry standard for measuring the decrease in brightness of emissive-type displays, such as plasma, CRTs, and LEPs, which are a type of organic light-emitting display (OLED). Testing at higher brightness and operating temperature was used due to the long operating time needed to measure the result. The measured values were then correlated with ongoing testing at room temperature and typical commercial display brightness levels of 100cd/m2.