Philips Polymer Vision is building a pilot plant to produce diagonal screens

Philips Polymer Vision is building a pilot plant to produce diagonal screens

Philips Polymer Vision has revealed plans for commercial production of a groundbreaking flexible display. The Dutch electronics giant has produced a prototype flexible plastic display measuring 13cm across the diagonal with a bending radius of 2cm that can show video images. It will build a pilot plant to produce one million such screens a year in 2005.

The display is a major advance for polymer electronics. Announced in this week’s Nature Materials, it represents the thinnest and most flexible active-matrix display reported to date. It is also the largest and highest resolution organic electronics-based display yet, with close to 80,000 thin-film transistors packed into the screen presenting 85dpi.

The display combines a 25 micron-thick back layer, containing the polymer electronics to drive the pixels, with a 200-micron front layer of reflective “electronic ink” developed by E Ink Corporation. Polymer Vision can currently produce 100 screens a week in a batch process. It said the rugged and compact screens were ideal for military and mobile consumer applications.