fantastic plastic

The Cambridge Evening News is reporting that

Amazon, the world’s biggest bookseller, is in talks with Cambridge company, Plastic Logic, about the end of books as we know them. […]
News of the Amazon/Plastic Logic link was given to a Cambridge audience on Thursday night when Hermann Hauser delivered the RSA Lecture at Magdalene College. […]
“The reason why Amazon doesn’t sell e-books at the moment is because people don’t like reading on a screen, but now they can curl
up with an e-book,” Dr Hauser said.

This past week, Plastic Logic has been showing off its new product concepts at a trade show in San Francisco, under the heading ‘Life is Flexible‘.

DisplaySearch

has updated its 2006 OLED Technology Report, a comprehensive examination of the fledgling OLED industry, which reached revenues of $491M in 2005, up 8% Y/Y, and unit shipments of 55.8M, up 72%. Updates are due to a number of recent changes affecting the OLED industry:

* Liquidation of SK Display
* TMDisplay and Seiko Epson de-emphasizing commercialization of AMOLEDs
* Pioneer closing its ELDis JV and the concurrent end of its AMOLED activity
* Sharp reduction in small/medium panel ASPs due to over capacity in TFT LCDs
* Continuing difficulty in using LTPS backplanes for AMOLEDs

One of the unique features of the report is a forecast of the OLED capacity as shown in Table 2 by active, passive, SM and P-OLED technology and the associated organic material usage in weight and in revenue, differentiated by emitting and conducting layers for both small molecule and P-OLEDs. The organic material is forecast to grow from $220M in 2005 to $549M in 2010, driven by the increased capacity of the AMOLED display makers.

*Includes material used in production and R&D facilities for 2” displays

NE Asia is reporting on iSuppli market predictions for flexible displays.

Note that according to their prediction, flat or formed displays (not bent during use) will take the lion’s share, while

True flexibility/rollability will appear in displays with small shipments in 2008, and will become a US$59 million market in 2013 […].

Challenges for the flexible display industry are listed as:
- the OLED industry’s promised shift to flexible has still not happened
- large investments are required in manufacturing infrastructure *
- new, unknown market

* [While this is certainly true for new deposition/patterning methods (e.g. inkjet printing) the hurdle is much lower for companies using traditional lithography.]

 

 

CDT and Litrex

are paving the way for the production of a new generation of high resolution polymer organic light emitting displays (P-OLED) through the development of an inkjet printing solution capable of producing P-OLED displays at up to 200 pixels per inch (ppi).

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) and Toppan Printing

have produced a number of 5.5 inch full color active matrix polymer OLED (P-OLED) displays using a roll printing method. A demonstrator will be shown at the SID conference in San Francisco. The displays - believed to be the first of their type ever produced - are the result of close co-operation between the two companies and part of their joint development activity announced in February 2005.

Solution processing of P-OLED displays is more commonly associated with inkjet printing, and the companies believe that roll printing represents a promising alternative production technique which offers the potential for very good display uniformity, very high display resolution and low capital and operating costs. […]

The technique is based on relief printing, a well-established method for the transfer of soluble materials onto a range of substrates, but which has been developed by Toppan into a highly precise technology capable of producing patterned pixels of small size and highly uniform distribution. The companies believe that the process is capable of scaling to large substrate size and very high resolution, potentially over 200 ppi.

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