The UK's' Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) developed new backplane fabrication processes to allow the bending of Organic Thin Film Transistors (OTFT) arrays to small radii (1 mm) without a significant reduction in device performance. In the video below you can see a bending test of the OTFT array produced on a 50-micron thick PEN film. Those arrays can be bent up to 10,000 times.
The CPI hopes that these new processes will eventually lead to the adoption of such organic backplanes in OLED displays, and they say that the OTFTs feature a charge mobility that is "suitable" for OLED driving (although it was only 2 cm2/Vs. They have since upgraded it to 4 cm2/Vs) and they managed to fabricate display pixel-sized OTFTs.
These transistors were developed at CPI. CPI is also collaborating with Plastic Logic in the ROBOLED project which aims to investigate and overcome the challenges in driving OLED displays with OTFT backplanes. The CPI expects that the first plastic-based AMOLED display with plastic-logic OTFTs will be demonstrated in 2014.
