Executive Summary

A collection of terms and definitions for the OLED and lighting community as a first step to a dictionary.
Discussion on this glossary is very welcome: Please send us your comments.

Before introducing standards a common use of terms and definitions is an important boundary condition. The need to come up with a standardised language and a common understanding in terms of measuring OLEDs and the interpretation of measurement results is evident, since OLED technology made the first move into applications via displays. Now the technology has emerged, the performance has reached a level that the threshold is reached to move into lighting applications. Display and lighting requirements are different and OLED technology has to adopt to lighting terms, but it also has to emphasise its special features such as large area, thinness and degrees of freedom in design such as flexibility and transparency. In this sense, OLEDs are a special type of light sources, which are not compatible with existing lamps.

This document aims for a common use of terms and definitions referring to all aspects of OLED technology and products. Currently, many terms are not well defined or are used with double meaning. Additionally, when scientific results are reported, very often background information is not published which is necessary to reach a suitable judgement of measurement values.

The document is created and updated continuously. The owner is the WP5 leader of OLED100.eu project. It will be regularly disseminated within the OLED100.eu consortium. Furthermore, the document will be distributed to selected OLED players world wide and their feedback will be used for improvement of this document.