November 2009 - Design LED Products to collaborate in EU Light-Rolls manufacturing project
Design LED Products Ltd, is participating in the EU Light-Rolls project which is developing roll-to-roll printing processes for the manufacture of large area, flexible LED displays and lighting.
Dr James Gourlay, technical director and founder of Design LED said, "We are very excited by the possibilities that this type of manufacturing capability will offer to our products. It has the potential to open up a wide range of applications through improved performance and reduced cost.” He continued, “In the near future we can visualise every house being lit by energy efficient and long-life time wall paper-like lighting films, delivered to your door in a roll for installation."
Flexible electronics is an emerging market with a massive potential for roll-to-roll manufacturing and a huge range of possible applications, from displays, smart packaging & large area lighting panels including "illuminated wallpaper".
This project is unique in that it seeks to integrated solid state LED chips and light-guides to achieve large area illumination. This differs significantly from electroluminescent film or the newer Organic LED technologies. While the base electronic and illumination technologies are proven, there is a growing need for a new manufacturing method and technology to support ultra-high volume production. Light-Rolls aims to offer a new unique production solution by applying new polymer based production methods, new chip assembly methods, optimized interconnection technologies in a Roll-to-Roll manufacturing process.
Roll-to-roll processing is best known for printing newspapers as well as packaging and assembly. The production process involves a roll of polymer film fed into a line of similar roll-to-roll processing equipment stages and finished product comes out in a roll at the end without any intervention. Today, conventional printing industries are mature and have become a synonym for the highest degree of automation and highest speed of production throughput. For display and lighting panels, this promises to minimise the cost of production and maximise yield, allowing a wide scale adoption of flexible large area parts.
About Design LED Products LimitedFounded in early 2004, Design LED products have developed and patented a manufacturing technology to embed Light Emitting Diodes within printed light guides. This enables thin, inexpensive, segmented display panels suitable for a range of applications from consumer electrical & electronic devices, automotive, point or sale advertising & industrial keypads.
Design LED aims to become the world leader in printed light products technology in a wide range of markets including consumer electronics, automotive, industrial and point of sale. More than 50 billion LEDs are sold every year into products and Design LED has the opportunity to both displace existing solutions and enable a new generation of products.
The project www.light-rolls.eu is co-funded by Community's Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement n° CP-TP “28686".