An organic light-emitting diode (OLED), also known as organic electroluminescent (organic EL) diode, is a type of light-emitting diode (LED) in which the emissive electroluminescent layer is an organic compound film that emits light in response to an electric current. This organic layer is situated between two electrodes; typically, at least one of these electrodes is transparent. OLEDs are used to create digital displays in devices such as television screens, computer monitors, and portable systems such as smartphones and handheld game consoles; its significant advantage over liquid-crystal displays (LCD) is that the individual pixels emit their own light, requiring no backlight like LED-lit LCDs.
OLEDs are fundamentally different from LEDs and do not employ a crystalline structure. There are two main families of OLED: those based on small molecules and those employing polymers. Adding mobile ions to an OLED creates a light-emitting electrochemical cell (LEC) which has a slightly different mode of operation. An OLED display matrix can have various control schemes:
A passive-matrix (PMOLED) where each row and line in the display is controlled sequentially, one by one
Active-matrix (AMOLED) that uses a thin-film transistor (TFT) backplane to directly access and switch each individual pixel on or off, allowing for higher resolution and larger display sizes.
The invention of OLED can be attributed to two chemists at Eastman Kodak in 1987, namely Ching Wan Tang and Steven Van Slyke. Its public commercial use began with a car stereo in 1997 by Pioneer and for more than a decade its use was mainly for small monochrome displays in-car or portable systems, although the first full-color OLED display was implemented in a Kodak digicam in 2003. OLED displays took off during the latter half of the 2010s and have since been implemented mainly in wearable devices, smartphones, and high-end televisions.
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