Researchers Develop "An Entirely New Display Technology," Offering Soft, Stretchable OLED Panels

Researchers from the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory, Soochow University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, claim to have come up with "an entirely new display technology" allowing for a soft, stretchable, bendable panel based on organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs).

"One of the most important components of nearly every consumer electronic we use today is a display," says Sihon Wang, assistant professor of molecular engineering and co-project lead with Juan de Pablo, "and we've combined knowledge from many different fields to create an entirely new display technology."

"This is the class of material you need to finally be able to develop truly flexible screens," adds de Pablo, the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. "This work is really foundational and I expect it to allow many technologies that we haven’t even thought of yet."

The team's novel display is based on OLED technology, which is already in heavy use for everything from ultra-compact displays in embedded systems to large-scale high-end TVs — but existing implementations are fragile. "The materials currently used in these state-of-the-art OLED displays are very brittle," Wang claims. "They don't have any stretchability. Our goal was to create something that maintained the electroluminescence of OLED but with stretchable polymers."

Beginning with simulations before branching out to prototype creation in the lab, the team sought to develop new atomic models of polymers that are both stretchable and able to form a light-emitting organic material. The result: devices which offer high brightness while deforming on demand, based on thermally-activated delayed fluorescence — an approach for high-efficiency conversion of electrical energy into light.

Wang, who has previously worked on stretchable brain-inspired neuromorphic machine learning accelerators targeting wearable healthcare devices, is keen to see the technology used in wearables — and, potentially, in implantables too, such as devices which attempt to control neuronal activity in the brain through exposure to light.

"My overall dream is to make all the essential components for a full system of wearable electronics, from sensing to processing to displaying information," Wang says of his vision. "Having this stretchable light-emitting material is another step toward that dream."

The team's work has been published in the journal Nature Materials under closed-access terms, while the code and force-field parameters used for the simulation have been made available on GitHub under an unspecified license.