Customer Success: Avalon Holographics

“Lumerical FDTD solutions is an integral component of our research and development structure. The user-friendly layout allows for quick setup of short-term projects, while its scripting capabilities, documentation, and examples have enabled us to consistently and effectively advance our technology. The knowledgeable support team also ensures any inquiries are quickly resolved in a convenient, timely manner, resulting in continual progress.

By using Lumerical FDTD solutions, we were able to create highly accurate microcavity OLED models for fabrication from a set of custom scripts. This reduced the number of trial and tuning iterations required in fabrication, as would have typically been required. Lumerical was instrumental in the reduction of both time and costs required for successful completion of this specific project, and continues as the primary tool to execute our current, patented method for tuning the optical structure of the OLED structures we are designing. Currently, we are also using Lumerical FDTD solutions to develop next-generation optical structures for fabrication.”

Abstract

Control of the emission characteristics of a light source in a light field display poses a significant benefit in the resulting 3D display quality. The design of microcavity OLEDs is detailed, including FDTD optimizations. The resulting output profiles for the microcavity OLEDs are compared to standard OLEDs and the designs.

Introduction

Light field displays provide multiple views such that at each viewing position a user will get a separate view in each eye, providing an interesting experience, but suffer from some limitations. In particular, the individual views must be separated in such a way that the user experiences smooth transitions between viewing zones, while maintaining an independent and perceivable view from the adjacent views. Therefore, the ability to control the emission characteristics of each unit of the light field display is desired, in particular with an increased pixel density to provide an increased resolution per view. The development and results of microcavity based OLEDs are detailed. The theoretical design variables used to define the initial structure of the OLEDs at the peak emission wavelength are summarized. FDTD simulations used to optimize the optical path lengths in the microcavity are detailed. Fabricated MCOLED results are presented, and compared to OLEDs not bound in a microcavity, as well as FDTD simulation results.

Background

An organic light emitting diode consists of multiple organic material layers, between a pair of electrodes, resulting in characteristic broad spectral width and Lambertian intensity profile emission. While these emission characteristics may be desirable for standard display solutions, the ability to tailor the optical properties for the device for a light field display using microcavity effects is required.

Conclusions

An introduction to the design equations to determine the optical path length, and estimate the output profiles were presented. Details of the FDTD simulations to optimize the optical path lengths were reported, and the resulting output spectrum of the fabricated OLEDs is compared with the modeled structures.