Ingolstadt, Germany - Audi is ready to go public with what it says is the next step in automotive lighting - organic light emitting diodes.
It sounds ludicrously 'new age-y' but the truth is even more weird than it sounds. While a conventional solid-state LED is a little transistor-like component that produces a pinpoint of very bright light when an electric current is passed across it (which is why there are so many of them in, say, an LED tail light) an OLED is a thin, flat sheet.
A Matrix OLED light (and they are already featured in a concept that will be on show at the Frankfurt motor show in little more than a month) consists of two electrodes (one of which is transparent) incorporating numerous thin layers of organic semiconductor materials, each less than a thousandth of a millimetre thick. A low DC voltage - between three and four volts - activates the layers and makes them light up, the colour depending on the molecular composition of the light source.
The light is even across the surface of the matrix, and its dimming is continuously variable. It doesn't cast any shadows, produces very little heat and needs no reflector or projector lenses, which makes OLEDs efficient, lightweight and very versatile, since they have hardly any depth.
BUT WAIT, IT GETS EVEN WEIRDER
As soon as the OLEDS can be developed to produce enough light density, they can be used as brake and indicator lights. At the moment, the organic films are sandwiched in thin glass sheets, rather like the screen of a tablet or mobile phone, so they're flat, but Audi is working on ways to use plastic sheets sheets, which will mean they can be moulded to any shape you want.
And that will open up a world of new possibilities for car designers.
They can also be divided into small segments that can be individually controlled at different brightness levels, with transparent OLEDs in various colours layered over each other, making possible different layouts with extremely fast switchover times.
IOL