A team of British researchers has come up with a way to create more energy-efficient and lower cost blue OLED pixels that might one day pave the way for cheaper and better quality televisions.
The team, which includes academics from the University of Cambridge and University of Manchester, say they have discovered a new “oxadiazine” host material that could solve some major headaches around the development of blue OLED pixels, according to a report by OLED-Info.
While it’s fairly simple to create energy-efficient green and red OLED pixels, the blue ones have always struggled to match that performance, and the materials used are less stable and have a much shorter lifetime.
As the researchers explain in their abstract: “Energy-efficient and deep-blue organic light-emitting diodes with long operating stability remains a key challenge to enable a disruptive change in OLED display and lighting technology.”
Quite simply, the existing materials used to create blue OLED pixels fall far short of the green and reds in terms of their performance and stability, but the researchers believe they have made some progress in closing that gap.
According to their paper, which was published in the journal Communications Chemistry, they have created a new blue material that delivers a 21% improvement in energy efficiency as well as “excellent thermal stability”.
While every kind of OLED display requires blue pixels, it’s an especially interesting development for the TV industry, as the likes of LG Display and Samsung Display currently use multiple layers of them to achieve the incredibly accurate colour reproduction and deep blacks that viewers know and love.
For instance, LG’s newest display, the so-called “four-stack” Primary RGB Tandem OLED panel that’s featured in its 2025 OLED televisions, uses more blue pixel layers than either green or red. Moreover, Samsung Display’s QD-OLED tech is said to rely heavily on blue light that’s transformed into green and red by shining it through a layer of quantum dots.
If TV makers can use this new material, they could potentially get away with using fewer layers of blue OLED pixels, which could mean significant cost savings and lower energy use.
The new, British-developed blue OLED material could potentially rival, and perhaps even surpass the up-and-coming phosphorescent blue technology, often known as “Blue Pholed”, that’s being designed by a company called Universal Display Corp.
We’ve heard quite a bit about that Blue Pholed tech in recent years, with a report last August claiming that it has been making progress and that LG Display hopes to integrate it with its first panels by 2026. Even so, the tech has been in the works for several years already, and there have already been a few false starts, so it remains to be seen if we’ll actually see it soon.
Nonetheless, it’s an exciting development, as Universal Display claims Blue Pholed can deliver 100% more internal luminous efficiency than existing blue OLED pixels.
It’s not immediately clear which technology is superior - Blue Pholed or the new British material, but in any case we cannot say when either will become available. Laboratory breakthroughs are one thing, but it takes time to work out how to mass produce such things at scale.
In any case, developments of this kind bode well for the OLED display industry. It’s clear that there is lots of money being thrown at the problem, and some very smart minds are pursuing some very compelling solutions. So it may not be long until cheaper, higher quality and longer-lasting OLED televisions become available.
If and when these breakthroughs work their way down to consumers, we may finally see the day when new OLED TVs can be had for less than £1,000 from the moment they hit the shops.
