Flexible Displays - Graduating to Plastic
August 19th, 2008By David Barnes, Vice President, Strategic Analysis
Remember your first date? I took Silvia to see “The Graduate” staring a (then) young Dustin Hoffman. In the movie, Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock character is taken aside by Mr. McGuire, a middle-aged man who offers career guidance to the college graduate. “I just want to say one word to you — just one word — plastics,” he whispers. Before and after that, at least for my generation, plastic meant phony (another reference to technology) or artificial: not groovy. I mean not cool.
After working on the upcoming 2008 Flexible Display & Electronics Report I can say that we boomers were wrong. Plastic is cool. Plastic Logic closed another round of funding this month that supports a plastic display fab in Germany. The company is ready to put organic transistors underneath E Ink materials on plastic film. Expect to see products next year. But wait, there’s more! Polymer Vision will be shipping Readius® products this year using similar technology. Such products represent only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
It may take several more years before roll-to-roll processes can challenge glass substrate processes but there are many interesting ways to make plastic displays on separate sheets today. For example, the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University found it possible to fabricate active-matrix displays by gluing plastic sheets to glass sheets during high temperature processes then peeling the plastic off for the final steps. The resulting displays can withstand military-grade tests, which mean they should survive any business trip you or I are likely to take even if we can’t afford the extra $7 for a pillow. This and other approaches to flexible display technology will enable a range of new products in war, in the war room and in the waiting room.
Silvia and I saw “The Graduate” on the big screen forty years ago. In less than forty years from now teenagers could be watching that movie on plastic and think Mr. McGuire was right.
