The 7th Annual Flexible Electronics & Displays Conference was held in Phoenix on January 21st-24th and had a record attendance. It was organized by the US Display Consortium (USDC) and there was a general sense of excitement that flexible displays, materials & manufacturing equipment had really arrived as products in mass production & are also relevant for military uses.

Paul Beatty
Analyst

The technical program had a mixture of 71 papers from industry and academia. Papers from Prime View International, Plastic Logic and PolyVision drove home the message that factories are now producing electrophoretic monochrome displays on thin flexible substrates for real products. These products include either a-Si thin film transistors as a backplane or new organic TFTs for another generation of electronic book readers (EBRs). Dr Scott Liu of PVI said all the key ingredients for EBRs were now available, including bright reflective electrophoretic displays, low cost storage and, in the case of Amazon’s Kindle launched in December 2007, wireless downloading. PVI supplies all the E-Ink displays for EBRs laminated to its a-Si backplane. These are produced on the same line side-by-side with backplanes for LCDs. The fab has a capacity of 55,000 substrates a month and uses Gen 2.5 glass as the carrier for the thin flexible substrates. Electronics are added to a polyimide film on the glass - electronics on plastic with laser release -"EPLaR." At present there are some six manufacturers of EBRs, including Sony with their latest PRS-505 model. By the end of 2008, larger models will be in production with 9.7 inch diagonal screens for serious reading & e-newspapers.

Dr. John Mills, COO of Plastic Logic, announced the commercialization of organic TFT backplanes and display modules with shipments due to commence Q1 2009 from their newly built fabrication plant in Dresden Germany. This fab has a capacity of some 1M ten-inch displays using Gen 3 glass EPLaR processing. He expressed the belief that printing, even without roll to roll methods, will achieve the lowest cost. Also, he claimed good stability and performance on a par with a-Si but at lower cost.

Most products now becoming available use flexible substrates for their light weight and resistance to breaking. Some use genuinely flexible capability in the sense of unrolling, or more usually unfolding. (The folding displays do not actually crease.) Edzer Huitema, CTO of Polymer Vision, also spoke about their backplane with organic TFTs mounted with an E-Ink display. This product is being sold as the ‘Readius’ for a mobile information device where the 0.1 mm thick display is folded around the pocket sized unit opening out into a diagonal of 5 inches.

Interestingly, there seemed to be less concern than expected by some speakers about cracking of indium-tin-oxide transparent electrodes for rollable or foldable displays. However, Dr. Frank Louwet of AGFA did give a paper on their new generation of screen printable inks for Orgacon PEDOT:PSS transparent conductors with lower sheet resistance of about 150 Ohms/sq & greater stability.

Another interesting display paper was given by Asad Khan of Kent Displays, Inc. on their cholesteric reflective LCDs. Kent produces full color displays with ink jet printed conducting polymer electrodes, R2R processing and polymer substrates only 12 microns thick. These can be used for complex displays such as flexible signage or simpler ones for flash drives and electronic labels.

In another paper on materials, Fred McCormick of 3M announced alternating layers of inorganic/polymer thin films made with web processing as a water barrier. These are now being sampled on PET & PEN plastic substrates. Performance of 10 micrograms/m2-day at room temperature is said to be sufficient for OLEDs such as the screen printed polymer ones from Add Vision.

Indeed, Devin MacKenzie from Add Vision showed truly paper-flexible polymer OLEDs using their screen printing deposition suitable to be used as substitutes for inorganic AC electroluminescent (ACEL) phosphor lamps and signs. These organic devices are more colorful and brighter than the ACEL they could replace. They have been shown to produce 100 cd/m2 for over 2000 hours and are in use in keypads for ALPS.

Other papers and exhibits showed manufacturing equipment suitable for flexible electronics & displays including roll to roll (R2R) capability from Applied Materials and Northfield Automation Systems. NewWay Air Bearings had porous rollers able to provide an air cushion avoiding stretching & alignment problems in R2R processing. There were ink jet printing systems from Fuji Film Dimatix, Imaging Technology International and Unijet.

Altogether, this was a most stimulating conference and Insight Media will watch out for these products as they unfold and unroll over the next few months. For the latest information going forward, see Mobile Display Report every month.

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