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OLED-power link jumps from useless 50Mb / s to useful 1Gb / s, Ars Technica

OLED-power link jumps from useless 50Mb / s to useful 1Gb / s, Ars Technica
    

      blink blink blink –

             

Tuning tiny OLEDs’ fabrication results in faster switching times.

      

      

To allow for faster switching, the researchers started using a silicon substrate in place of glass to transfer heat away from the diode, allowing them to raise the voltage without wrecking everything. To further reduce the switching time, researchers looked for ways to reduce the resistance of the electrodes themselves. OLEDs make use of transparent electrodes made from indium tin oxide, a material with high resistance. This was replaced with a thin layer of silver, while the bottom electrode, which doesn’t need to be transparent, was made from a (comparatively) thick layer of aluminum. In addition, resistance was reduced by running multiple tracks to each electrode. Finally, the researchers changed the chemistry of the OLED by mixing two organic materials, which provided a faster response. These optimizations resulted in a bandwidth in excess of a (MHz.) Blink faster Now, in the modulation scheme I described above, 728 MHz would not be enough bandwidth for a 1Gb / s link. However, no one uses such a simple scheme. The researchers used modern modulation techniques to encode much more data within a small bandwidth (the scheme they used is a subspecies of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, which is used in most modern devices). By combining this with error correction schemes, they got the data rate up to 1.1Gb / s over a distance of 2m.

The big benefit of OLEDs is that they are cheap and very flexible: you can print an OLED on almost any surface as long as you can connect electrodes. So, if you have a single-use medical diagnostics that requires a light source, an OLED is your best option. Unfortunately, the slow switching of OLEDs means that many applications remain pipe dreams.

This research helps with that somewhat, although not as much as you might think. The big issue remains the heat dissipation. By moving to a silicon substrate (or, indeed, any crystalline substrate), the researchers immediately limited the flexibility of their OLEDs. It is no longer easy to print the OLED on anything. The substrates will make the OLED a bit more expensive, too, undermining the other big benefit of OLEDs. However, for communications, this is definitely the right direction to be going. And, here I don’t just mean between nodes in a data center, but also within-device communication for applications where both expense and speed matter. Unfortunately, the researchers still have a ways to go: DDR5 runs at over (Gb / s, and fast ethernet is already at over) (Gb / s.) Nature Communications, , DOI:

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