While we’re thinking about displays and flexible electronics, it’s worth noting an important first that was mentioned at Flextech: all-plastic flexible AMOLED displays from Plastic Logic and Novaled.
If you’ve got an Android smartphone, you’re probably familiar with AMOLED displays. They’re clear, bright, fast, and used in most Samsung phones and lots of others, besides. But those displays are under glass, which is not flexible. And while there have been many OLEDs produced, there haven’t been any with underlying electronics at an industrial scale.
That’s what’s new here: an AMOLED display on a flexible organic thin film transistor (OTFT) backplane in an industrial process. What’s not clear from this release is what kind of flexibility we’re talking about: bendable, in which the material is bent and stays bent; or rollable, in which the material can be deformed but returns to a flat state. And while the companies say the production process is industrial, they’re not claiming production at scale.