USA: 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. Rising shipments of flexible displays are being enabled by the establishment of several batch and roll-to-roll manufacturing facilities. The figure presents iSuppli's forecast for flexible display revenue for the period of 2007 through 2013.

"Flexible displays are intuitively appealing to end users and product designers because of their ruggedness, thinness, light weight and novelty," said Jennifer Colegrove, senior analyst for emerging displays at iSuppli. "Such displays also offer manufacturers the potential for inexpensive fabrication because they can be made using new printing methods or roll-to-roll processing. Furthermore, flexible displays have the advantage of easy and relatively inexpensive shipping and safety handling compared to conventional rigid screens. When flexible displays break, they don't have any sharp edges that can cause injuries or further damage."

Flexible on display at SID
Due to 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 US partner Universal Display Corp. demonstrated their four-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 five-inch monochrome electrophoretic display. The company also announced the color version prototype at 65k color and 127ppi 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.

Flex your power
Flexible displays are being used for a multitude of products, including e-readers/e-paper, electronic display cards, electronic shelf labels, automotive applications, clothing/wearable displays, removable storage devices and point-of-purchase/ public signage and advertisements.

Flexible displays already entered consumers' daily lives long before the Readius, with products like Motorola Inc.'s display for its Motofone handset, electronic card displays and t-shirt displays. However, all the flexible displays in the market before 2008 were direct-drive or passive-matrix types. Before this year, there were no Active Matrix (AM) flexible displays that could provide the kind of image quality that users expect from their LCD-TVs and PC monitors. Because of this, 2008 represents "Year One" for the AM flexible display market.

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.