The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reports it learned yesterday that a consortium of 14 Japanese LCD panel and materials companies - including Sharp, Sumitomo Chemical and Dai Nippon Printing - plans to develop a bendable LCD panel by fiscal 2009.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer and
Mobile Display Report

The consortium, which calls itself the Technology Research Association for Advanced Display Materials (TRADIM), is planning to make a display roughly 1mm thick - about one third the thickness of conventional LCDs used in mobile handsets - by using polymer instead of glass substrates, and by making a single LCD film perform multiple functions.

We have already seen a variety of flexible and bendable demonstration displays using different technologies, but this seems to be a different kind of effort. For one, the companies want to make a display with a resolution comparable to that of today’s flat-panel TV sets. Second, previous development efforts have involved only one or two companies. The combination here of leading display, materials and processing companies offers at least a hope that the significant hurdles on the way to mass production of bendable displays will be addressed at each appropriate level. And for even more cooperation and support, TRADIM will work with Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.

Third, it’s significant that the consortium is talking about "bendable" - rather than "flexible" - displays for use in portable products and on curved surfaces. There can be many degrees of flexibility in a display, from a display that unrolls like a window shade each time you want to use it to a display that is bent once when it is inserted into, for example, a curved watch case or applied to a curved surface. Making a "bend-once" display is far less challenging than making a rollable display, although it will still keep the consortium’s members busy until at least 2009.

TRADIM’s budge for the project is ¥3.1B ($27M), including ¥1.2B from Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization.

So, what are we to make of this remarkable degree of cooperation? Some years ago, Japanese companies licensed and transferred much of their LCD and PDP technology to Korean and Taiwanese companies, rapidly becoming the third largest display-making nation in the world instead of the first, with interesting results.

On the one hand, the Japanese display industry has prospered by selling materials and components to its non-Japanese licensees and other customers, and there has also been a resurgence in display manufacturing. Sharp is a leading maker of large LCDs for television, as Matsushita is a leading maker of large PDPs. And Japanese companies such as Toshiba Matsushita Display (TMD), Sharp, and NEC retained leading roles in the making of sophisticated small and/or medium displays.

But how is Japan positioned for the next wave of display technology? Frankly, not well. Although Sony, TMD and others have OLED programs, it would seems that Korea’s Samsung SDI and Taiwan’s AUO are closer to (relatively) high-volume roll-outs. And some of the most exciting recent OLED developments have been coming from Kodak (USA), DuPont (USA), Samsung SDI (Korea), UDC (USA) and CDT (UK).

There is an even newer category of displays: highly reflective displays with very low power consumption being developed by Qualcomm (USA) and Liquavista (The Netherlands).

So an obvious question is, where does the Japanese display industry go next? One place to go is flexible displays, where the Japanese industry’s impressive expertise in materials, processes, and display integration could give it a significant jump on its national rivals. That’s a goal worth the cooperation of 14 companies, 2 government organizations, and a university.