AGFA-Gevaert NV, IMEC of Belgium, and Holst Centre, Philips Research and TNO of the Netherlands have prototyped a flexible OLED lighting panel in which highly-conductive transparent resin electrodes are used in place of ITO (indium tin oxide).

The new transparent resin named Orgacon has a high conductivity which has been difficult to get from ITO in a low-temperature process, and is suited for coating method, thus is relatively easy to be used in a printing process. The development has been supported by European Union's "Fast2Light" project aiming at manufacturing flexible OLED lamps by a printing process.

The use of Orgacon instead of ITO improves the electrical conductivity of the transparent electrodes by about six times, according to AGFA, without revealing the details such as a specific value of the conductivity.

The Orgacon has been developed by AGFA as a static protection material for photographic films and is based on PEDOT/PSS, a conductive resin used for OLED devices. A similar material is also in development by Sanyo Electric Co Ltd and the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

More printing processes are used than before in making the prototyped OLED lighting panel. For example, its wiring pattern on the transparent electrodes was printed by inkjet technology. Also, the panel can be bent by the hand for the use of metal foil as a substrate. Its luminance and emission lifetime have not been disclosed yet.