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DuPont Displays Combines Innovative Materials and Process Technology for Printed OLEDs to Reduce Industry Barriers

DuPont Displays, a leader in the development of organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, today announced it has developed a new set of OLED materials that are designed for lower-cost solution-based fabrication methods. Several prototype solution-processed, active-matrix full-color OLED displays, fabricated with DuPont materials, will be showcased at the Society for Information Display’s (SID) International Symposium in Long Beach, California, May 20-25, 2007.

The new material set, which includes all of the essential materials used in the construction of an OLED display, relies on DuPont^™ HIL (hole injection layer) material and includes DuPont light emitting and charge transport materials. Combined with the novel DuPont manufacturing process, the new high-performance material set enables lower-cost, scalable manufacturing techniques.

"The OLED displays industry is under severe pressure to reduce manufacturing costs in order to compete with LCDs," said William Feehery, global business director, DuPont OLEDs. "We are very excited that our new set of solution-based OLED materials, and the improved uniformity and reliability we’ve been able to achieve with our printing process, have the ability to overcome the cost barriers the industry has been facing. We believe that larger OLED displays can be manufactured at a cost of up to 30 percent less than today’s LCDs."

Using this advanced solution-based materials set, DuPont Displays has also exceeded the reported performance of other solution-based OLED materials. DuPont Displays has measured accelerated lifetimes of the three primary colors that could translate in a display to 20,000 hours of white lifetime (which is extended by as much as 5 times when showing video) at a normal

viewing brightness (200 cd/m²). At 1,000 cd/m², the standard test luminance used in the industry, the DuPont materials have lifetimes (T₅₀) of 14,000 hours for blue with CIE 1931 color coordinates of (0.14, 0.16), 230,000 hours for green with color coordinates of (0.29, 0.65), and 46,000 hours for red with color coordinates of (0.66, 0.34). In a review of widely available reports, these are the longest measured lifetimes for a solution material set with equivalent color coordinates.

Over the last 12 months, DuPont Displays has also made progress with the innovative solution-printing process announced last year. Using this proprietary process and specialized equipment, DuPont OLED materials were printed onto active-matrix thin-film transistor (TFT) backplanes supplied by leading TFT providers, and then protected from environmental degradation with DuPont^™ Drylox^™ encapsulation technology. To demonstrate both the quality and the adaptability of the DuPont Display printing process, two different display formats will be exhibited at SID 2007. The 4.3 and 6.1-inch full-color active-matrix displays have print resolution of 128 and 80 ppi respectively, and were fabricated at the DuPont Displays pilot facility in Santa Barbara, California.

In addition to the exhibition at SID, the DuPont cutting-edge process technology will be discussed in a session titled, "Solution Processing of Small Molecule OLEDs," on Friday, May 25, from 10:40 a.m. to 11:40 p.m. in Ballroom B. For more information on products on exhibit at the DuPont booth, please visit www.sid2007.dupont.com.

DuPont is a science-based products and services company. Founded in 1802, DuPont puts science to work by creating sustainable solutions essential to a better, safer, healthier life for people everywhere. Operating in more than 70 countries, DuPont offers a wide range of innovative products and services for markets including agriculture and food; building and construction; communications; and transportation.

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5/21/07

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