Roll-up displays: fact or fiction?

Many companies have undertaken the challenge of creating flexible displays but the perfect specimen is still some way off. This article looks at the numerous technological challenges involved in making a display flexible, including the thickness of the display relative to its rigidity, and finding a set of technologies that can combine to create a large, stable matrix of individually addressable pixels that will flex. In addition, a number of flexible display technologies under development are described, including liquid crystal displays (LCDs), electrophoretic light-controlling material-based displays, plastic semiconductor backplanes and semiconductors based on organic polymers for plastic electronics, organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays, organic thin film transistor (TFT) technology, an enhanced ink jet-based patterning technique for organic polymer materials, and the development of new emissive materials to go with the flexible backplanes.