OTFT - Page 3

The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) is a UK based R&D institute that helps companies develop and scale manufacturing processes. The CPI, in collaboration with Heidelberg Instruments have developed a new high-resolution high-speed roll-to-roll (R2R) digital lithography tool for the manufacture of flexible organic thin film transistors (OTFTs).

The machine is already installed at the CPI's National Printable Electronics Facility in County Durham, UK. The new tool provides the ability to continuously manufacture OTFTs directly onto rolls of plastic film at rates approaching 0.1 m²/min.

A few months ago, FlexEnable and Chunghwa Picture Tube (CPT) demonstrated a full-color flexible AMOLED display that uses FlexEnable's OTFT backplane. 

This glass-free display is still a prototype (as you can see there are many defects) - but it's a great demonstration of a truly flexible display. It operates at 60Hz and is only 125 microns thick.

In August 2015 Polyera, a US-based OTFT backplane developer, announced their first product, the Wove Band flexible E Ink smart band, to be released in the second half of 2016. Our sister-site E-Ink-Info posted an interesting interview with the company's Special Projects VP, Brendan Florez.

Brendan explains the company's OTFT backplane technology and details Polyera's business and goals. Polyera's backplane has been demonstrated to drive an OLED display in the past, so hopefully OTFT OLEDs will be coming from Polyera in the future. Read the full interview here.

UK's SmartKem, a developer of high-performance organic backplanes for flexible displays, has signed agreements with two "leading Asian display makers" to transfer SmartKem's OTFT tru-FLEX technology into the production lines of the display makers, once process feasibility has been established.

SmartKem will work closely with its two partners to accelerate technology transfer processes to ensure 100% compatibility and full integration.

US-based Polyera was established in 2005 to develop OTFT-based flexible display backplanes - suitable for OLEDs and E Ink displays. The company already demonstrated a flexible OLED based on their backplanes, and now they announced their first product, the Wove Band smartband device.

We do not have any technical details, but this looks to be an interesting device, and hopefully they will follow-up with a similar OLED-based device. Polyera will start shipping samples in December to developers and artists, and the commercial launch is planned for mid-2016.

Professor Bjorn Lussem from Kent State University received a $180,000 grant from the Binational Science Foundation to continue his development of an OLED display that is driven by a vertical organic transistor.

Professor Lussem explains that vertical transistors use less voltage so they are more power efficient. A vertical design also means you can make higher density displays. Professor Lussem's partner in this reserach is Professor Nir tessler from Israel's Technion institute for technology.

FlexEnable and Chunghwa Picture Tube (CPT) demonstrate an OTFT full-color flexible AMOLED display manufactured by using FlexEnable's low-temperature process and CPT's RGB OLED technology.

The glass-free prototype display (which you can see above) is a full-color AMOLED that operates at 60Hz and is only 125 microns thick. This is a great achievement, but it's not clear whether CPT aims to commercialize such displays any time soon.

Next week at SID, Novaled will report on a new Vertical organic field-effect transistors (V-OFETs) that can be used to drive high-brightness AMOLED displays. Novaled says that the new backplane can be deposited on plastic backplanes, and it allows a 4X brightness enhancement compared to reference AMOLEDs.

Vertical-OETs has been first reported in 2011 by the University of Florida. That particular research used carbon-nanotube based backplanes, and it was spun-off to form a company called nVerPix which is commercializing the technology.

FlexEnable (which was spun-off from Plastic Logic in February 2015) has joined the Graphene Flagship, the European $1 billion graphene research project. Last year Plastic Logic demonstrated the world's first display based on a graphene backplane (a 150-PPI active-matrix E Ink panel), and now we have some more details on the company's graphene OTFT goals.

That 2014 E Ink display used graphene as a transparent electrode. FlexEnable is still developing the technology, and now wants to use it in OLED displays and organic LCDs.

UK's SmartKem, a developer of high-performance organic backplanes for flexible displays, signed a 3-year collaboration agreement with the UK CPI institute to support customer pre-production prototype development that use the company's tru-FLEX TFTs.

SmartKem recently completed a 3 million Euro series A funding round from BASF Venture Capital, Octopus Investments, Entrepreneurs Fund and Finance Wales. Towards the end of 2014 the company opened a new OTFT fabrication facility in Manchester, that will enable the company's partners to co-develop flexible OTFT-based products - in the display and sensor industries.