Flexible displays are playing an increasingly important role in the global high-tech industry, serving as the crucial enabling technology for a new generation of portable devices that are designed to combine mobility with compelling user interfaces.
Due to the arrival of Polymer Vision’s Readius pocket-sized e-reader and other such products, iSuppli Corp. forecasts the total flexible display market will reach $2.8 billion by 2013, a 35-times expansion from about $80 million in 2007. Because of these attributes, flexible displays were on center stage at the Society for Information Display (SID) 2008 International Symposium, Seminar and Exhibition, held in May in Los Angeles.

South Korean manufacturer LG Display Co. Ltd. and its U.S. partner Universal Display Corp. demonstrated their 4-inch flexible Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode (AM-OLED) at the show. The display features QVGA (320 by 240) resolution, with a metal foil backplane substrate.

E Ink showcased a variety of flexible electrophoretic bi-stable displays, from simple direct drive screens for wristwatches, to beautifully-designed mobile-phone cover displays, to active matrix high resolution displays for e-book/mobile phones, such as those used in Polymer Vision’s Readius. Polymer Vision demonstrated its soon-to-be-in-the-market Readius, which features a foldable 5-inch monochrome electrophoretic display. The company also announced the color version prototype at 65k color and 127 ppi resolution.

Prime View International (PVI) demonstrated its Flexi-e, an active matrix electrophoretic display on polyimide substrate. SiPix, Kent Displays and Bridgestone also showed a number of flexible displays. At the SID event, there also were more than a dozen presentations on flexible displays, including from Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University, Hewlett Packard, Dai Nippon Printing, Nippon Steel Corp and Honeywell.
There now are more than a dozen display technologies can be made into flexible screens, including traditional LCD, bi-stable LCD, OLED, electrophoretic, electrochromic and Electroluminescent (EL). Find out more about flexible displays in iSuppli’s 2008 report on the technology.

For more information on iSuppli’s emerging display research, please visit: http://www.isuppli.com/catalog/L2_edts.asp.