Taiwan Institute Develops 10.4-Inch Flexible Display

Dec 17, 2007 05:00 GMT  ·  By

Ultra-thin, flexible displays will probably represent the paper of the future, but there's still a lot of work to be done before they'll really turn mainstream. However, it seems that the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) from Taiwan may have made an important step forward in the right direction, as it has just announced the development of a 10.4-inch flexible display.

As Siu Han and Emily Chuang report for Digitimes, ITRI's flexible display incorporates a 10.4-inch cholesteric LCD (Ch-LC) flexible display and a flexible LED backlighting unit (BLU). The development of such a flexible display was possible by using two plastic substrates with a thickness of less than 10mm, rather than the usual glass substrate.

Furthermore, according to ITRI's statement on the subject, the display's structure is quite simple, not to mention very thin and also ultra-light, which makes it 50% slimmer than traditional color Ch-LCD displays. Moreover, the flexible display has a NTSC color gamut of 57%.

ITRI's list of announcements also includes a flexible LED-based BLU (backlighting unit), which has been used in a 7-inch color flexible active matrix (AM) LCD display, as well as a monochrome Ch-LCD flexible display. The latter is built on a plastic substrate, is based on roll-to-roll manufacturing, has a 3.5-inch width and the length can have just about any size.

Although these announcements might seem just another piece of news one can go over quickly, the truth of the matter is that they're pretty important, considering the current trends in technology. Thus, it's becoming quite clear that mobile carriers will be forced to change their marketing strategies over the next few years and also deliver various types of content to handsets, which means that mobile phones will also require larger (and perhaps flexible) displays.

Furthermore, e-book readers are also likely to become more popular, with e-newspapers soon to follow, which means that in just a few years' time, such flexible displays will most likely be mass produced by today's top LCD manufacturers, for example.

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The 10.4-inch flexible display
The rolling monochrome display
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