Powerfilm: HP develops flexible OLED Displays

HP is developing this amazing technology with Phicot, a subsidiary of PowerFilm (PFLM.L), AIM London.

At Phicot’s facility, layers of amorphous silicon and insulating materials are deposited onto plastic. These rolls of plastic are then sent to a facility at HP Labs, where engineers use a novel kind of lithography, called self-aligned imprint lithography (SAIL), to etch transistors onto the plastic’s surface.

Once the transistors have been deposited, the screen itself must be added. HP has tested its transistors using E-Ink and with its own reflective display technology, capable of showing color and video. According to Carl Taussig, director of HP’s information surfaces labs, the amorphous silicon transistors could be replaced with those made of other semiconductors that could drive OLEDs.

Organic (Small molecule/polymer) light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) can be a great candidate to bring a new information display concept to our future life. Recently, tremendous progress has been made toward application of OLEDs in full color flat panel displays and other devices. However, with current technologies, OLEDs are still struggling with high manufacturing costs which really limit the size of OLEDs panels and with life time, especially differential aging of colors. Besides the cost, there is still quite a long way to go for OLEDs display being really flexible. The goal is to create a display that is light weight, flexible, thin, extremely low cost, video capable, brilliant color as well as low power consumption. Plastic and roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing will be key enablers toward this goal. Of course, a lot of components are associated for fabricating a flexible OLEDs display. Two important components are active matrix thin film transistor (TFT) backplane and OLEDs based frontplane. Hewlett-Packard Labs as the world-class high tech research center have developed Self-Aligned Imprint Lithography (SAIL) method so as to be the first to demonstrate lowcost fabrication of an amorphous silicon TFT backplane containing very high (sub-micro) resolution and aspect ratio with a fully R2R process on a roll of 50 um thick and 1km long plastic substrates. With our highly flexible R2R processed active matrix TFT backplanes, for the OLEDs based frontplane fabrication to be compatible with plastic and R2R manufacturing, solution-processing appears more attractive and more cost-effective due to its simplicity and highly reduced equipment costs than vacuum deposition of small molecules by which the production cost increases super-linearly with the area to be coated, especially for most advanced OLEDs using multilayer structures.”

 

 

Posted on | junio 16, 2011 | http://www.invesbolsa.com/research/powerfilm-hp-develops-flexible-oled-displays.html#comments

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