Display Technology
According to Transparency Market Research, the market for displays enabled by organic or plastic electronics will be worth $16,740 million in 2018.
Lab to fab
For flexible plastic displays the transition from lab to fab is now complete. Plastic Logic can reliably manufacture monochrome and colour flexible EPD display components in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. The next challenge is finding innovative product designers to make the best use of the unique form factors enabled by these displays. Their extreme durability makes them attractive for traditional e-readers in challenging environments such as schools or factories. Furthermore, a great wealth of applications for this breakthrough technology exists, some of which are already known and others have yet even to be discovered. For example, Gartner Inc. sees a potential market for flexible displays being used for advertising wrapped around columns in shops or in window displays, which communicate with potential customers, displaying personalised adverts on their smartphones as they pass by. In general, as the display size increases it will be the weight that becomes the most attractive feature, with peripheral devices for your smartphones emerging that will have the look and feel of a sheet of paper. As the display size decreases it will be the formability of the display that will create new markets. For example, imagine a watch that has the information density of your smartphone, but actually wraps around your wrist!
comprised of millions of individual transistors, which now can be reliably fabricated on a plastic sheet. In the future, smart packaging will include a series of these transistors configured to complete complex logic operations to offer end- users additional security or brand promotion opportunities for products. Plastic electronics is a young technology, which at its core represents the transition from traditional rigid manufacturing paradigms to more customisable techniques. Eventually it will dovetail with the emerging 3D-printing revolution to allow consumers the ultimate flexibility in designing new products.
At Plastic Logic we believe that in a few short years we will recall that the flexible display was only the start of a wave of plastic electronics enabled products. This can be illustrated best by breaking down the technology that enables a flexible display: A flexible plastic display component is comprised of a frontplane, which is the display effect, and a backplane that is fabricated using plastic electronics. In a display the backplane
operates as an output device with its high density array of switches supplying the correct voltage levels to every pixel. However, these backplanes can also be used as an input device and there is currently considerable interest in flexible sensor technologies. One example is a digital x-ray sensor that can conform to the body thus becoming a much more effective imaging device. The backplane itself is actually
The rise of the silicon industry was best illustrated by Moore’s law, which motivated an entire industry to compress as much processing power into the smallest area possible. The equivalent view for the plastic electronics industry will be the complete opposite: processing circuitry will be processed over ever expanding areas to make every surface you contact ‘smarter’. Compared with the silicon industry, plastic electronics has come a long way in a very short time. For our flexible display technology Plastic Logic is seeing interest as diverse as e-readers to displays on kettles. This is instructive to other market sectors for flexible electronics in the future, where an equally diverse range of applications will in all likelihood emerge.
Plastic Logic |
www.plasticlogic.com
Mike Banach is Senior Research Manager at Plastic Logic Ltd
www.cieonline.co.uk
Components in Electronics
September 2012 13
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