2001---Sony Announces the World's Largest OLED Prototype at 13 Inches

Our next hurdle was discovering a way to seal the organic electroluminescent film. An OLED component device consists of a glass substrate, TFT, organic electroluminescent film, electrodes and color filters. It is vulnerable to moisture and oxygen, and if exposed to the open air, its performance will quickly deteriorate. Producing an OLED display, required finding a way to completely seal the organic electroluminescent film from the surrounding atmosphere.

Previous manufacturing methods used a metal cover to seal this film. This encased inert gases in a form of hollow sealing. Because light could not penetrate the side sealed with the metal cover, bottom emission was the only manufacturing alternative. Furthermore, with hollow sealing, there was concern that simply pressing on the panel surface would cause the OLED component device surface to come into contact with the sealing section. This limited the potential for creating larger panels. If our ambition was to produce large panels in the future, we would have to consider a new sealing method that would work in combination with top emission. The solution we came up with was fully-stabilized sealing where the OLED substrate is directly attached to the sealing substrate with an adhesive. This allows the sealing substrate and the color filters to be more easily integrated. By utilizing this fully-stabilized sealing technology, we achieved what was previously considered impossible: a direct-view, top emission OLED display. In 2001, this concentration of technologies enabled us to announce what was then the world's largest OLED display prototype at 13 inches.

Moving Toward Larger Screen Sizes

Our most urgent priority now is achieving larger screen sizes. There are many issues to resolve, but we are pursuing R&D every day to realize OLED TVs with larger screens and enhancing the advanced picture quality even further. We are of course supported by resources throughout the entire Sony Group. We look forward to your continued support and hope you will track our progress as we move forward in nurturing Sony's OLED TV business.