fantastic plastic

Plastic Logic announced that it has raised $100 million to build a factory for flexible active matrix display modules in Dresden (Germany).

To fund this comprehensive commercialization program, Plastic Logic has completed a first closing of $100 million of equity finance led by Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Investment Corporation. Existing investors Amadeus, which led the seed financing of Plastic Logic, Intel Capital, Bank of America, BASF Venture Capital, Quest for Growth and Merifin Capital also participated. The financing is one of the largest in the history of European venture capital. […]
The facility will produce display modules for portable electronic reader devices – a product category that is predicted to grow to 41.6 million units in 2010. It will have an initial capacity of more than a million display modules per year and production will start in 2008. Dresden in the ‘Silicon Saxony’ region of eastern Germany has been chosen as the facility location following an extensive worldwide site selection process.

Instead of the usual rubbed polyimide alignment layers,

they use the in-situ photopolymerization of alkyl acrylate monomers in the presence of nematic liquid crystals to provide a cellular matrix of liquid crystalline droplets in which the chemical structure of the encapsulating polymer controls the liquid crystal alignment.

“Small changes in the chemical nature of the polymer will change the alignment of the molecules at surfaces,” said Mohan Srinivasarao, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Polymer, Textile and Fiber Engineering. “It turns out that this can be done over a fairly large area, and it is reproducible.[…]”

Srinivasarao described the self-aligning of liquid crystals Sept 14 at the 232nd national meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco.

Apart from eliminating the rubbing step (a potential yield killer) the technique offers the following advantages over standard standard LCs for Ds:

• resulting displays are less sensitive to mechanical deformations (rigidity provided by the liquid crystals), and thus more suitable for flexible displays

• completely dark ‘off’ state (made possible by the vertical alignment of the liquid crystals)

Srinivasarao and collaborators Jung Ok Park and Jian Zhou have used the technique and a nematic material with negative dielectric anisotropy to fabricate highly flexible liquid crystal devices that have high contrast and fast response times – without using an alignment layer. Control is obtained by variation of the alkyl side chains and through copolymerization of two dissimilar monofunctional acrylates.

Bi-stable metal sheets might be useful as substrates for rollable screens (e.g. electronic newspaper). The ‘dimpled’ copper-alloy structures are apparently cheap to produce from a single sheet of metal.
BBC article
Smart structures group at the Department of Engineering (Cambridge)

Gizmag is reporting on SiPix and SmartDisplayer’s recently announced payment card with a flexible electrophoretic display, which

enables cardholders to generate and display a dynamic passcode for one-time use.

The application subsequently landed the companies the Display Application of the Year Award from the Society for Information Display (SID). […]
SiPix Microcup Electronic Paper is the key enabler for the DisplayCard solution, specifically designed for the application’s requirements – flexibility, impact resistance, extreme thinness, and ultra-low power consumption. The result is a flexible, 0.25-mm thin e-paper display […].
To meet demand by merchant banks, SiPix will complete expansion of its automated high-volume module production line before the end of 2006.

ORFID Corporation […] has signed an agreement with BASF Future Business GmbH (BFB), a subsidiary of BASF Aktiengesellschaft, to collaborate on the development and commercialization of printable organic electronic devices for use in display backplanes, RFID tags and other next generation electronic products.
Under the agreement, BFB will provide organic materials, materials expertise and financial resources for the development and commercialization of printable electronics. ORFID will build certain organic devices and develop processes for printing and testing the devices.

ORFID’s technology is based on research by Prof. Yang Yang’s group at UCLA: using a Vertical Organic Field Effect Transistor (VOFET) structure allows ORFID to fabricate TFTs with very short channel lengths (and thus high on-currents), without the need for high-resolution patterning methods.

ORFID has developed a breakthrough in organic electronics, called the VOFET (Vertical Organic Field Effect Transistor). Due to its unique architecture and use of conductive polymers (plastics that conduct electricity) in its fabrication, the VOFET offers performance characteristics similar to conventional, wafer-based silicon transistors, but can be produced at significantly lower cost, while offering other important advantages. Using organic materials, the VOFET can be manufactured using low-cost printing techniques. ORFID’s goal, and that of electronics manufacturers around the world, is to enable the production of a new generation of ultra-thin, light-weight and flexible electronic products, such as displays and “smart packaging” that incorporates printed RFID tags.

[press release]

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.

press release

NanoMarkets predictions for the OLED and e-paper, smart packaging, and thin-film photovoltaics industries:

Markets for OLED and Paper-Like Displays to Total $10.2 Billion by 2011:

• combined sales of OLED displays and paper-like displays will reach $10.2 billion by 2011 and then go on to reach $14.7 billion by 2013.
• shelf-edge displays will be the biggest opportunity for the paper-like display business in the next few years, generating $1.2 billion in annual revenues by 2011.
• OLED televisions will reach $2.2 billion in revenues in 2011
• by 2011, flexible displays will account for $1.7 billion in revenues.

Smart Packaging Market to Reach $4.8 billion by 2011:

• The global smart packaging market will grow to $4.8 billion in 2011 and reach $14.1 billion in 2013
• Smart packaging will account for over $1.1 billion in printable electronics components by 2011 growing to $4.2 billion in 2013
• Smart packaging will also consume $1.1 billion in printable and chip-based RFID tags by 2011

Thin Film and Organic Photovoltaic Market To Reach $2.3 Billion ($US) in 2011:

• Integrated building and construction products such as PV enabled roofing and window materials are projected to be the largest market opportunity measuring $800 million ($US) in 2011 with large project and consumer electronic products the second and third largest market opportunities.
• On the materials front, amorphous silicon, the best established of the various thin-film PV materials, will represent an $800 million ($US) opportunity followed by organic and hybrid organic/inorganic materials and then CIS/CIGS.
• Thin film/organic PV is also generating buzz in the industry and several companies have received large VC rounds. Major multinationals are also supporting this technology as Honda has announced it will soon start full-scale production of thin film PV and Shell has just sold off its conventional PV business to focus on thin film. On the other hand, NanoMarkets points out that thin film and organic PV is also a technology space that has received its fair share of hype and controversy with competing claims by different manufacturers on where and how it can be applied and disputes over conversion efficiencies and costs per watt.

According to Displaybank

Japans’ Tohoku Pioneer has launched mass production at its new plant dedicating to producing white organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) for mobile handset backlights (BLUs), the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reports. The company is first to start mass production of white OLEDs in Japan. With this launch, the OLED plans to ship white OLEDs from the plant in Aomori Prefecture to overseas mobile phone vendors this month.

DuPont has announced solution-processable small molecule OLED materials, enabling low-cost deposition techniques previously only possible with polymeric OLED materials.

DuPont’s latest technological achievement enables — for the first time — the combination of high performance and long lifetime of small molecule OLED materials with a printing process that is substantially lower cost and more scalable to larger display sizes than the industry incumbent processes, such as vapor deposition. Through a combination of innovative processing device architecture and new materials, DuPont has demonstrated printing of small molecule OLED materials from solution.

DuPont has achieved lifetimes of the three primary colors each exceeding 10,000 hours of white lifetime (or 40,000 hours for a typical video) at the brightnesses required for a 200 nit display. With this development, DuPont has demonstrated that OLEDs can be manufactured at high yields and low total cost.

A while ago a group at Philips research presented (’Video-speed electronic paper based on electrowetting‘, Nature Vol. 425, pp. 383-385, 25 September 2003; link to pdf reprint) a novel display type based on the principle of electrowetting.
Liquavista, a spin-out with New Venture Partners as main investor and Philips remaining a shareholder, is now commercialising this technology (press release).

Some of the benefits compared to other display technologies are:

• video speed
• low power consumption
  (less need for supplimentary illumination)
• indoor & outdoor usability
• no inherent limit on viewing angle

Regarding the manufacturing process, Liquavista is building on existing LCD technoloy:

To contemplate the development and promotion of a new technology, without considering accessibility of large scale manufacturing resource would challenge the benefits of even the most exciting of technologies. That is why, from the outset, Liquavista has developed electrowetting display technology to be almost entirely compatible with existing display manufacturing techniques and processes. […]
A proprietary low cost, scalable fill process, performed at the bipane level, and patented by Liquavista, improves further on the standard LCD manufacturing cycle.

More background information here.