Panasonic Corporation based in Osaka, Japan announced that it has developed a white Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) with the world's highest luminous efficiency*1 of 114 lm/W (light-emitting area of 1 cm²). In addition, the company reportedly achieved a luminous efficiency of 110 lm/W with a device with a larger emitting area of 25 cm². The company focused on "light extraction technology" and the "all phosphorescent white OLED technology", which is technology for the multilayering of the organic emitting layer.

The company boasts light extraction efficiency of about 50 percent, which is reportedly nearly 2.5 times improvement in light extraction efficiency relative to the standard OLED device without light extraction film. At the same time the company claims to have achieved a long lifetime of over 100,000 hours (time until achieving half the brightness value). Panasonic says that the new developments leverage the use of Built-up Light Extraction Substrate (BLES) technology, which uses the optimized arrangement of the film, glass and air for the suppression of light confinement in the OLED. The company also optimized design of stacked organic emitting layers with high-efficiency phosphorescent materials.

According to Panasonic, typically, the organic light emitting layers have higher refractive indices than those of a glass used for substrate and air, and only about 20% of the total generated light can be extracted because of the total internal reflection at interfaces. Panasonic says it developed,a light extraction film attached onto the substrate and a light-scattering structure placed between organic layers and the substrate. Despite this, the light extraction efficiency stayed below 40%.

The technologies from the development were announced at The Society for Information Display (SID) 2013, held on May 21-24 in Vancouver, Canada. The development was conducted in the "Fundamental Technology Development of Next Generation Lighting of High-efficiency and High-quality" project since March 2010 under a contract with the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, with Idemitsu Kosan Co., Ltd, TAZMO CO., LTD., Choshu Industry Co., Ltd., Yamagata University, and Aoyama Gakuin University. The high-efficiency phosphorescent materials were provided by the Universal Display Corporation of the United States.