Material technologies

OLED technology was first developed at Eastman Kodak Company by Dr. Ching W. Tang using small molecules. The production of small-molecule displays often involves vacuum deposition, which makes the production process more expensive than other processing techniques. Since this is typically carried out on glass substrates, these displays are also not flexible, though this limitation is not inherent to small-molecule organic materials. The term OLED traditionally refers to this type of device, though some are using the term SM-OLED.

Molecules commonly used in OLEDs include organo-metallic chelates (for example Alq3, used in the first organic light-emitting device) and conjugated dendrimers.