Based on its proprietary thick‐dielectric electroluminescent (TDEL) display technology, iFire, together with joint development partners Sanyo and Dai Nippon Printing (DNP), has successfully developed 17‐inch full‐color prototypes with video quality comparable to CRT displays and a luminance of 300 cd/m2. The company's development of the Color‐By‐Blue (CBB) technique has further simplified the already simple manufacturing process of TDEL displays, and also accelerated iFire's development of the world's first full‐color 34‐inch inorganic electroluminescent HDTV screen. Based on detailed cost model analysis, iFire believes that the TDEL technology can be used to achieve high performance and low cost HDTV displays, and is initially targeting the 30″ – 40″ market segment, with commercial production planned for the 2006 timeframe.

In 1991, iFire Technology Corp. invented a new solid state display technology based on a combination of thick film screen printing and thin film phosphors, called Thick Dielectric Electroluminescent, or TDEL. Since that time, the technology has been under continuous development to improve brightness, contrast, colour, image quality, lifetime, and manufacturability (cost). Now the company is in transition from R&D to commercialization, with the construction of a pilot manufacturing facility underway, and plans for volume production in discussion. This paper will review TDEL's development stages and current status.

No abstract

The study of a thick dielectric electroluminescent device has identified the presence of a light emission from ZnS:Mn and ZnS:Tb, F phosphors coincident with the trailing edge of the driving voltage pulse. The trailing edge emission appears to be related to some of the unique electro-optical properties of this EL technology. Both leading and trailing edge current measurements, together with capacitance–voltage data, have been employed to characterize the device. A doped phosphor probe layer was used to clarify the location of the source for the most intense trailing edge luminance emission. A mechanism for the trailing edge luminance is proposed, similar to that which is responsible for the luminescence peak observed at the leading edge of the driving pulse as seen in displays using only thin-film dielectric layers.

Abstract— A high‐performance inorganic electroluminescence (EL) device has been successfully developed by using an EL structure with a thick dielectric layer (TDEL) and sputtered BaAl2S4:Eu blue phosphor. The luminance and efficacy were higher than 2300 cd/m2 and 2.5 lm/W at L60, 120 Hz, respectively. Furthermore, the luminance at L60, 1.2 kHz was more than 23,000 cd/m2. The phosphor layer has a single‐phase and a highly oriented crystalline structure. The phosphor also shows high stability in air. A 34‐in. high‐definition television (HDTV) has been developed by combining a TDEL structure and color‐conversion materials. The panels with an optimized color filter demonstrated a peak luminance of 350 cd/m2, a color gamut of more than 100% NTSC, and a wide viewing angle similar to that of plasma‐display panels. The high reproducibility of the 34‐in. panels using our pilot line has been confirmed.