Nanomarkets posted an interesting article on flexible glass (based on their Flexible Glass Market report). Basically they're saying that the opportunities for flexible glass have never been better, and they forecast that the market in 2013 will reach $125 million, and this will grow to over $2 billion before 2020.
Interestingly Nanomarkets says that the OLED market will start adopting flexible glass in 2013 - with $4 million in revenue (this will grow to $280 million by 2020). Perhaps Nanomarket thinks that Samsung will adopt flexible glass in their first YOUM flexible OLED based panels?
In fact Nanomarket believes that the adoption of flexible glass in the OLED market will be faster than in the LCD market (not in volume, but in adoption rate) - because OLED itself is a new technology and makers will adapt to new technologies better and because flexible glass is very suitable for the OLED manufacturing processes. Longer term, flexible glass will be used in Roll-To-Roll (R2R) OLED manufacturing plants.
Back in SID 2012 Corning announced the new Willow glass product (shown in the video above). This is an ultra-slim (50 um and 100 um) flexible glass that can support backplanes and color filters in both LCD and OLED panels. Willow glass can withstand temperatures up to 500 degrees Celsius, and can be used in R2R production processes - and in fact ITRI announced in November 2012 that they developed the world's first full R2R process in collaboration with Corning. AGC also has a flexible glass technology of their own.
