CAMBRIDGE, England — A breakthrough in blue-emitting polymer material is the final piece of the puzzle to create full-color organic-LED (OLED) displays, Cambridge Display Technology said this week. Cambridge, the inventor of the light-emitting polymer variety of OLEDs, achieved its breakthrough via joint development work with Dow Chemical, which developed materials for the effort, said Mark Gostick, marketing director for Cambridge Display Technology (CDT).

CDT has now produced "a pure-white single-pixel display [with a] delicate balance of red, green and blue polymer components," Gostick reported.

CDT late last year showed multicolor light-emitting polymer (LEP) displays using red and green polymers, but "blue has been the most difficult color to achieve, as it sits at the far end of the visible-light spectrum," Gostick said.

He said the company "now understands the necessary chemistry to produce an LEP screen of any color in the visible-light spectrum." That arose from up to 12 months' work on a family of materials that Gostick said can provide RGB "with the same device architecture."

"Blue is the holy grail in the research and development of color displays," said CDT's technical director, Jeremy Burroughes. "LED developers took more than a decade to do it, but we've got there in less than 18 months. We now have shown the three primary colors needed for a full-color display with a common device architecture and voltage operating regime, which is extremely significant in terms of manufacturability of LEP based products."

CDT has been at the forefront of work on a new class of light-emitting plastic displays that promise to be simultaneously lightweight and low in profile, power and cost. Dow is one of a number of key development partners the company has enticed to its cause in recent years.