OLED

An OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, is a type of light-emitting diode whose electroluminescent layer is a thin film of organic compound, so that each pixel generates its own light and a display built from them needs no separate backlight the way a liquid crystal display does. Andre Bernanose and colleagues first observed electroluminescence in organic materials in the early 1950s, and Roger Partridge built the first polymer light-emitting diode at Britain's National Physical Laboratory in 1974, but the chemists Ching Wan Tang and Steven Van Slyke at Eastman Kodak built the first practical OLED device in 1987, introducing a two-layer structure with separate hole-transporting and electron-transporting layers that lowered the operating voltage and improved efficiency over earlier attempts. Pioneer Corporation began commercial OLED manufacturing in 1997, Kodak built the first full-color OLED display into a digital camera in 2003, and Sony released the XEL-1, the first OLED television, in 2007.