Feel the Light: OLED with touch function

The OLED technology is the first real area light source technology in history. It overcomes traditional restrictions by point source lighting technologies (e.g. light bulbs or LED). Their features could be the starting point for highly efficient homogenous area light sources.

Beside the area aspects, OLED shows also the possibility for innovative light sources, e.g. structured light sources for signage, color-variable, transparent and flexible light sources. At the Plastic Electronic 2008 show the Fraunhofer IPMS presents for the first time an important innovation in OLED lighting: the worldwide first interactive touch controlled flat light source. Based on the fact that OLED is a cold light source, touching control is a safe operation.

“The touch function generate a completely new feeling of light. It´s like magic: turn on the light simply by a hand movement.” noted Jörg Amelung, head of business unit of organic materials and systems at the Fraunhofer IPMS.

Switching and dimming the light could be easily controlled by a hand movement, which overcomes the traditional controller function. Normally, the implementation of touch functions requires additional touch foils on the top of the devices. The new developed touch function requires no additional hardware, because the OLED itself is used to read out the touch signal – that´s the breakthrough, reached by the Fraunhofer IPMS.

In nearly every OLED this touch function could be implemented based on an for this purpose optimized readout circuit. This fact reduces the costs for the system and don´t influence the OLED efficiency.