Ready for ramp-up to an industrial scale

Plastic Logic’s approach overcomes the following key challenges with flexible active matrix display fabrication:

• Compatibility with low cost plastic substrates
• Flexible substrate distortion
• Flexible substrate handling
• Minimisation of materials and processing cost
• Robustness to flexing
• Connectorisation
• Meeting application requirements including performance, shelf-life and operating lifetime (without expensive encapsulation)

The process uses semiconducting, insulating and conducting polymers deposited using various solution processing techniques (polymer materials are fundamentally flexible unlike inorganic materials such as silicon). The process is low temperature and compensates for substrate distortion through direct-write patterning techniques including inkjet printing and laser patterning. The process completely avoids mask alignment which is a key limitation with photolithographic techniques on distorting flexible substrates. The key attributes of the process are:

• Able to manufacture flexible active-matrix electronic paper displays to 10” diagonal (with our first generation material set) at a resolution of 150 pixels per inch and with 16 grey levels.  Smaller displays can be fabricated at higher resolutions and samples up to 300 pixels per inch have been demonstrated. (See Gallery for images and videos).
• Uses an air-stable material set that minimises encapsulation requirements
• Distortion compensation capability enables substrate scalability up to Gen 3+ at a fast TAC time. By reducing patterning tolerances it also increases manufacturing yield.
• Low process temperature enables low cost PET substrate to be used
• Materials and processing cost is reduced by using additive printing steps in place of subtractive photolithographic steps
• Uses standard equipment from the display manufacturing and other industries to avoid bespoke equipment development
• Can be easily configured for different display form-factors without prohibitive tooling and set-up costs
• Displays are flexible to 5mm radius of curvature

Please see publications section for conference presentations which describe the process in more detail.

In January 2007, Plastic Logic announced that it has raised $100 million of equity finance to implement its process on an industrial scale and is building a fully commercial facility for manufacturing flexible active-matrix display modules.  The facility will initially be capable of volumes of greater than 1 million units a year and can be upgraded to significantly higher volumes as required.