Prime Vision International's Scott Liu coined a candidate for the catch-phrase of the week at the USDC Flexible Electronics and Displays conference: "2008 is Year 1 of flexible displays." Although companies such as Kent Displays may dispute that characterization, since it's been making small, flexible displays for a variety of applications for years, Liu's comments point to the imminent appearance of consumer-oriented devices such as PVI's Flexi-E e-paper and Polymer Vision's Readius rollable-display e-reader, which are being ramped in manufacturing and will soon be shipping to customers.
Polymer Vision announced earlier in the week that Readius will have its "commercial launch" in mid-2008.
CTO Edzer Huitema presented an overview and update of his company's progress, although there was little new information, other than the product launch news and a few additional details about its production progress. The company's UK-based rollable-display pilot manufacturing plant, formerly known as Innos before Polymer Vision bought the fab last year, runs "new materials with standard [AMLCD] equipment sets." E-Ink's Vizflex nanoink (which seemed to be mentioned in every other presentation) and SiPix's Microcup e-paper are used as part of the Polymer Vision's hybrid active-matrix technology platform. The process employs 150-mm silicon wafers as "rigid support carriers" for the display foil, which are delaminated from the underlying substrates at the end of the process. The facility "has made thousands of displays," according to Huitema.
PVI, which supplies displays for the Amazon Kindle e-reader already, expects to have its flexible display line (producing 6-inch, 600 x 800 pixels at 170 dpi devices) running alongside its high-volume, glass-based TFT-LCDs at its Gen 2.5 factory in Taiwan. This ability to process flex and glass in the same factory is part of PVI's "evolutionary approach," Liu said, where the company "uses existing tools and technologies as much as possible." The flexible displays are manufactured on 370 x 470 mm glass, employing spin-on polyimide deposition, then removed with a laser-release step at the end of the process. Data shown for the Flexi-E's TFT characteristics and stability compared favorably with its rigid-glass counterparts.
John Mills of Plastic Logic (purveyor of flexible displays using electrophoretic "electronic paper" displays for e-reader and other apps) told attendees that the company's manufacturing facility in Dresden has been completed. He also said that the company's 4000 square-meter cleanroom is slated to come online in March, the first tool has been shipped (an EVG coating system, he confirmed), all equipment will be installed and operational by July, with the production ramp to commence in August and first output of displays going to the EMS integrator to develop product for early 2009 delivery. Volume production will also begin in early '09, according to Mills.
Not quite lost in the shuffle, but drowned out a bit by the media and market hype generated by the likes of Polymer Vision and Plastic Logic, Kent Displays continues to successfully ply its flexible cholesteric display trade, adding to its own technology portfolio and dialing in its manufacturing practices. Asad Khan reminded the audience that Kent has been shipping products and gaining design wins in the industrial and consumer spaces for more than 10 years and that the company's ultra-low-power, rugged displays are truly flexible, with the both the front and backplanes bendable and conformable. Full-color, multilayer device designs will be coming to market soon, according to Khan, and the company will open a fully automated, narrow-web roll-to-roll volume production line in its Ohio facility by Q208.
Despite flexible displays' growing commercialization wave, many challenges remain for the nascent industry to reach its multibillion-dollar potential. When asked during a postsession panel about what were the hardest things to overcome, and what would you love to overcome moving forward, Kent's Khan pointed to the supply chain: "Getting materials at the right time and in the right quantity, and we still need that going forward."
Plastic Logic's Mills cited overcoming the original business plan, noting that in early 2002, "we thought we could solve all flexible problems." But when the company focused, it started to "make real progress and got some real investment. We put all our eggs in one basket," he reflected, "so we hope we don't drop the basket."
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