Panasonic Idemitsu OLED Lighting Co., Ltd. (PIOL), a joint venture established this year between Panasonic Electric Works Co., Ltd. (PEW, Osaka, Japan) and Idemitsu Kosan Co., Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan), has recently begun shipping high-color-rendering organic LED (OLED) lighting panels to the international markets.

Also, PEW will ship OLED lighting modules (the OLED panel plus driver circuitry, embedded in a frame) later this year.

The Panasonic OLED panel is a light source with a minimum color rendering of Ra=90, a panel section as thin as 2 mm and a luminance of 3000 cd/m². The panels luminous efficiency is 30 lm/W (60 lm at 2W), lifetime is 10,000 hours (with 70% lumen maintenance factor) and the correlated color temperature is 3000K.

PEW is scheduled to begin shipping ready-to-embed OLED lighting modules (i.e. the panel with built-in control circuitry) at the end of 2011. The modules feature a thin design (9 mm), narrow frame (11 mm width) and easy-to-replace light sources. (Source: LEDs Magazine)