“Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.”
- Tom Robbins, American Novelist (1936-present)
In recent years Organic Light Emitting Diodes or “OLEDs” have made considerable waves in the lighting market. Basically, an OLED is a self-illuminating solid-state device composed of thin films of organic molecules or polymers which are stacked between conductors. A major draw is their thinness, which can be between 100 to 500 nanometers thick or about 200 times smaller than a human hair. This feature provides an exciting possibility for flexible OLED applications.
Potentially, foldable OLED displays could be attached to fabrics to create electronic "smart" clothing. One example would be outdoor survival clothing with an integrated computer chip, cell phone, GPS receiver and OLED display sewn right into it. Another application would be in flexible e-paper, which would mimic the look and feel of a newspaper page. Once commercialized, the technology would slim down bulky daily newspapers and hopefully save tons of paper, wastewater and carbon emissions. Korea’s LG already announced its own e-paper prototype early in 2010, with more on the horizon.
However, the key road block is actually finding a commercially viable method of manufacturing. Samsung announced its initial version of the technology in 2008, it achieved this through use of a technique that coats the panel with a flexible membrane through use of an ion gun, ejecting microscopic amounts of itself into a thermodynamically unbalanced cloud of atoms. These then cling to and form a film on anything else in the vacuum chamber. While, innovative, this process was difficult to implement on any scale.
Sony then released its own version of the ultra-thin flexible OLED with a different process in May 2010. Sony’s new screen contains innovative organic thin-film transistors that are used to make the driver circuitry to run the display....(read
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