Chapter 7 - OLEDS

Chapter 7
OLEDs
Wouldn’t you like a high-definition TV that is 80 inches wide and less than a quarter-inch thick, uses less power than most TVs and can be rolled up when you're not using it and viewed "heads up" in your car or a display monitor built into your clothing? These things are coming soon with a technology called organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs).  OLEDs are solid-state devices composed of thin films of organic molecules that create light with  electricity but provide brighter, crisper displays on electronic devices and use less power than conventional light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or liquid crystal displays (LCDs) .¹

56 lumens-per-watt efficiency achievement proves that flexible, white OLED lighting devices are inexpensive using "solution-coatable" materials.  NISKAYUNA, NEW YORK & CLEVELAND, OHIO (JULY, 2010) - GE Global Research for the General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), GE Lighting and Konica Minolta (KM) have achieved a major breakthrough to making high-efficiency organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting devices a reality with illumination-quality white OLEDs using "solution-coatable" materials that are essential for producing OLEDs at a low cost.

GE's OLED lighting technology leader made the announcement during a presentation at the International Symposium on the Science and Technology of Light Sources being held in Eindhoven, Netherlands.  "We have produced high-performance white OLED lighting devices with a commercially viable lifetime using 'solution coating' rather than 'vacuum coating' processes. This allows us to make use of the high volume roll-to-roll manufacturing infrastructure that already has been perfected in the printing industry."

GE and KM plan to use high-speed, roll-to-roll processes rather than the vacuum-based batch processes making OLEDs commercially viable for general lighting applications. Solution, or wet coating, is the highest throughput manufacturing method for coating the organic layers.

John Strainic, global product general manager for GE Lighting added, "This type of coating is ideally suited for roll-to-roll processing and critical to enabling the production of OLEDs at high speeds. In simple terms, this latest achievement means we're starting to see the OLED light at the end of the tunnel."  GE and KM have been working together on OLED technology since 2007. 

OLEDs are thin, organic materials sandwiched between two electrodes that illuminate when an electrical charge is applied the next evolution in lighting products providing an entirely different way for people to light their homes or businesses and improved levels of efficiency and environmental performance. The two companies have plans to introduce their first flexible OLED lighting product in 2011.²

¹http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/oled.htm

²http://www.gelighting.com/eu/resources/press_room/OLED_announcement_EU.html

Chapter 6 Multi-core Processors

Chapter 6

Multi-core processor

A multi-core processor is a single computing component with two or more independent actual processors called "cores", (which are the units that read and execute program instructions).¹ The instruction tells the processor what to do such as reading data from memory or sending data to the user display, so rapidly that human perception experiences the results as the smooth operation of a program. The cores are part of a single integrated circuit die (known as a chip multiprocessor or CMP), or onto multiple dies in a single chip package.

A many-core processor is a multi-core processor in which the number of cores is large enough that traditional multi-processor techniques are no longer efficient because of congestion in supplying instructions and data to the many processors ( range of several tens of cores; above this  network on chip technology prevails). Tilera processors feature a switch in each core to route data through an on-chip mesh network to solve congestion, enabling their core count to scale up to 100 cores.

A dual-core processor has two cores (e.g. AMD Phenom II X2, Intel Core Duo), a quad-core processor contains four cores (e.g. AMD Phenom II X4, the Intel 2010 core line that includes three levels of quad-core processors, see i3, i5, and i7 at Intel Core), and a hexa-core processor contains six cores (e.g. AMD Phenom II X6, Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 980X). A multi-core processor implements multiprocessing in a single physical package. Designs include tightly or loosely coupled devices that share caches, and use message passing or shared memory inter-core communication methods. Common network topologies to interconnect cores include bus, ring, two-dimensional mesh, and crossbar. Homogeneous multi-core systems include only identical cores, heterogeneous multi-core systems are not identical.

The improvement in performance gained by the use of a multi-core processor depends very much on the software algorithms, possible gains are limited by the fraction of the software that can be parallelized to run on multiple cores simultaneously (Amdahl's law).  Most applications require effort in re-factoring the whole problem which make speed prohibitive.²

¹ TechTarget > multi-core processor LAST UPDATED: 27 Mar 2007

²"What makes parallel programming hard? bu FutureChips