Simple design of low-cost, organic white-light LED holds promise for widespread application

April 9, 2009--Researchers in China say they have developed a new type of light emitting diode (LED) made from inexpensive, plastic-like organic materials. Designed with a simplified "tandem" structure, it can produce twice as much light as a normal LED--including white light for home and office lighting. "This work is important because it is the realization of rather high efficiency white emission by a tandem structure," says Dongge Ma, who led the research with his colleagues at the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences(Beijing).