How Does an OLED Work? Fully Explained

Before getting into the working of OLED let us first explore what OLEDs are:

What is an OLED?

OLED is Organic Light Emitting Diode in which the emissive electroluminescent layer is made of a particular organic compound that emits light proportional to the current fed to it. Now to be more precise working of OLED can be given by how OLEDs emit light.

Working of OLED?

OLED working is no different than the conventional LEDs the only difference is that where LEDs use p and n-type semiconductors to generate electrons and holes OLEDs use organic compounds to do the same.

You can notice that when the potential difference is applied across the anode and cathode, cathode receives electrons from the applied source and anode loses it to maintain electrical neutrality hence an equal number of positive holes are created in anode region. Now the holes travel their way from anode to emissive layer through the conductive layer and they combine with electrons here to emit energy in form of electromagnetic waves or visible light.

Advantages of OLED

1. They are brighter than LCDs and LEDs hence they need no backlight, so they consume less energy comparatively.

2. Once transformed into display they are much thinner than LCDs and weigh less than half the weight of an LCD display of same resolution and color range.

3. Their color range is very much wide whereas color range of LCD is limited.

4. No particular viewing angle required in contrast to LCD, where colors turn dark when viewing from sides.

5. They respond almost 200 times faster than LCD displays.

6. Once this technology becomes more familiar, it would be cheaper than a LCD display in terms of manufacturing cost.