Flexible, lightweight and economical with energy: organic light emitting diodes are making it out of the lab and into the marketplace, and Stephen Forrest has been a major driver of that progress.
Already showing up in smartphones and high-end monitors and televisions, OLEDs are poised to replace liquid crystal displays and improve the efficiency of lighting. But there are still problems to be solved before these applications are practical.
Forrest will speak on this topic during his Distinguished University Professor lecture, set for 4 p.m. Thursday in the Rackham Graduate School Amphitheatre, with a reception following from 5-6 p.m. in the Assembly Hall. Distinguished University Professorships are the highest professorial title granted at U-M.
As the Peter A. Franken Distinguished University Professor of Engineering, Forrest will present his inaugural lecture, “Organic Light Emitting Devices (OLEDs): The Coming Revolution in Displays and Lighting.”
Forrest, Paul G. Goebel Professor of Engineering, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and materials science and engineering, College of Engineering; and professor of physics, LSA, also is a successful entrepreneur. One of the companies he co-founded, Universal Display Corp., commercialized OLEDs through Samsung and LG.
“As of this time, OLEDs are the dominant mobile display technology and are heading towards becoming dominant in TVs as well,” Forrest said. “They are taking this position not only for their high efficiency — and thus longer battery life in mobile applications — but also for their amazing brilliance, high contrast, saturated colors and very fast response useful in rapidly moving video scenes and virtual reality.”
His lecture will cover the excitement and opportunities around OLEDs as well as the challenges that must be overcome. They need longer lifetimes, better efficiency at transferring light out of the devices, and faster, cheaper manufacturing processes.
“OLEDs are also very attractive for interior lighting sources, with a potential for 100 percent electron-to-photon conversion efficiency. Their use can lead to major reductions in our use of electricity. It doesn’t get much better than that,” Forrest said.
With his new title, Forrest honors the legendary physics professor Peter A. Franken. Franken, who was at U-M from 1956 until 1973, is remembered for his scientific insight, leadership and practical jokes.
“He is considered the ‘father of nonlinear optics,'” Forrest said. “This work, along with the theory developed by Bloembergen, who won the Nobel Prize for that theory, opened up a vast area of science that dominates such fields as optical communications, lasers, metrology and so on.”
Forrest is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors. He is author of nearly 600 papers in technical journals, and holds more than 300 patents.
Forrest earned his Master of Science and Ph.D. in physics at U-M in 1979, returning to the university in 2006 as the vice president for research.
