OLED partners unveil all-plastic display

UK firm Plastic Logic and OLED materials supplier Novaled have announced a partnership in the development of truly flexible, all-plastic displays.

The partners have unveiled the first all-plastic OLED display demonstrator produced with an industrialised manufacturing process.

All-plastic OLED displays would be ideally placed to achieve the bendability, robustness and light weights that will be needed for future flexible devices in consumer electronics and the fast-growing wearable technology markets.

All-plastic OLED
The demonstrator was unveiled at the Flextech Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, on 6 February 2014.

Plastic Logic CEO Indro Mukerjee states: 'Flexible electronics is a reality, already proven through the development and manufacture of plastic, bendable displays and sensors. For the first time a fully organic, plastic, flexible AMOLED demonstration has been achieved with a real industrial fabrication process.

'This marks the start of a revolution in wearable products, the next frontier in consumer electronics - 2014 will be the year that wearable technology starts to go mainstream.'

The two partners plan to release a series of technology demonstrators during 2014, which will be part of each company's development of partnerships to enable the market for truly flexible, unbreakable AMOLED displays - a market segment forecast to be worth over $10 billion by 2020 (IHS 2013 report).

Partnership programme
The partnership will combine Plastic Logic's plastic, or organic, thin-film transistor (OTFT) - a technology that has been proven in a high-yield production process - with Novaled's OLED materials, already a feature in commercially available OLED-based products.

Gildas Sorin, CEO of Novaled, adds: Novaled has been developing its leadership in the doping of OLED devices. When applied to the OTFT Novaled technologies and materials will play a driving role in fully organic displays as well as in opening the fields of new organic devices.

Plastic Logic has already established a partner programme to work with leading global display makers and consumer electronics companies to enable flexible, plastic OLED supply chains, through licensing and technology transfer to mass-volume producers.

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