Stop Press! Electronic paper is here
Published: 15 Jul 2005 12:10 BST
A modern LCD plant producing 2m × 2m substrates for the LCD TV market costs upwards of $4bn, whereas an organic electronics display plant will cost $10 or $20m. This means that when they are in volume production, in about 2010, the cost of an A4 150dpi flexible organic electronic display is very likely to be a lot cheaper than a comparable LCD display.
"With the expectation that the materials and processes used in the manufacture of flexible displays will advance in the next five years, there is the possibility for a new paradigm in display manufacturing that could produce low-cost, high-volume flexible display products. Assuming current display component pricing trends continue on their downward trend, this could signal the potential for highly rugged displays that are one third the cost of today's fragile, glass-based displays," says Darren Bischoff, senior marketing Manager of E Ink.
Developing the technology for the frontplane of a flexible display brings new and different challenges. In a conventional LCD display the frontplane is also made of a rigid piece of glass in order to ensure that the cell gap between it and the backplane are precisely maintained as even slight variations in this gap will produce image distortions. Maintaining such a precise gap in a rollable or bendable display is extremely difficult, although researchers at both Philips and HP are working on the problem and have demonstrated prototype solutions.
For flexible high-resolution displays the best alternative to a liquid crystal frontplane is what is known as an electrophoretic frontplane. Besides being flexible, this frontplane technology also has the advantage that it uses reflected light, as opposed to conventional transmitted light or emitted light displays, which are used in LCD and CRT displays respectively. In this respect electrophoretic displays are much closer to paper in readability since they are viewable in ambient light, have a wide viewing angle, and a high contrast ratio.
A typical example is the technology developed by E Ink: tiny white and black pigment particles are given opposite electrical charges and are then encapsulated in microcapsules, each smaller than the diameter of a human hair. When an electric field is applied to a microcapsule, the pigment particles within it move, turning one side of the capsule white and the other black. These microcapsules are suspended in a flexible carrier medium to form the frontplane that can then be bonded to the backplane.
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