A recent Strategy Analytics research report concluded that a 3-inch diagonal display is the “sweet spot” above which the propensity to watch mobile TV rises tangibly. The trouble is, 3-inch and larger displays are simply too big to place in your pocket. But there is a solution - flexible roll-up displays. News on this front arrived today from the USDC-sponsored Flexible Displays conference in full swing this week in Phoenix. There, Universal Display Corp. (UDC) announced a full-color active-matrix OLED prototype that will eventually empower rollable displays.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor
of Projection Monthly &
Microdisplay Report

Flexible full-color thin displays are the Holy Grail of mobile device makers. They are constantly confronted with the engineering trade-offs in creating compact size, low weight and low power devices with screen sizes large enough to enjoy full motion video.

The prototype device from UDC features a top emitting OLED structure on a thin stainless steel substrate, which is needed to endure high manufacturing temperatures and be opaque. The breakthrough should enable a four-inch diagonal display that can portray a variety of images, including full-motion video. The company said it is approximately 0.1 mm thick and weighs a mere 6 grams (without external drive electronics and package) and according to the company, the comparable glass-based LCD would be approximately 10 times thicker and up to 5 times heavier.

Philips subsidiary Polymer Vision NV showed prototypes last spring that de-coupled the display size from the device using a roll-up display in the form of a pocket e-reader. The rollable, albeit grey scale device, is based on E-Ink technology and targets (non-color, non-motion) “information content” display applications like news feeds and e-mail.

To make things more exciting, General Electric announced a substrate breakthrough at the same conference, touting that GE researchers have developed a translucent plastic film technology that can withstand the processing temperatures in a more traditional bottom emitting OLED approach.

In case there was any doubt of OLED’s future, you simply have to look to the most recent DisplaySearch report and revenue forecast on the OLED market. They predict OLED display revenue will grow at an astounding rate-almost a full order of magnitude in the next two years from $518.1M in 2005 to $5.109B by 2007. The bulk of the growth, according to the research company, will be in mobile phone applications moving from $34M in 2005 to a cool $3.8B in revenue by 2007.

Other significant areas of growth charted by DisplaySearch include MP3 players and digital cameras. But with device convergence blurring tradition product lines, it’s hard to break out these numbers and predict what cross-over products will really be doing in 24 months.

These new display improvements that de-couple device size from display size and the significant revenue being generated in this space, means a brave new world of display applications are on the horizon. It looks like Buck Rogers-type rollable displays are coming to your fountain-pen/personal communicator sooner than you may think. –SS