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USDC’s 4th Annual Flexible Display Conference Reveals
Surging Interest and Momentum in
Flexible Display Manufacturing R&D Efforts
Stacey Voorhees, MCA
Discussion surrounding flexible displays and microelectronics heated up last month in Arizona at USDC’s 4th Annual Flexible Displays and Microelectronics Conference. Attended by nearly 300 technologists and display industry executives, the conference featured a number of engaging presentations centered around recent achievements made toward addressing the hurdles associated with the commercialization of flexible displays. Despite these hurdles, the consensus was that this technology is making significant strides as a result of the collaborative efforts among industry, government and academic partners.
Commenting on the success of this year’s conference, Dr. M.R. Pinnel, USDC’s chief technical officer and program chairman noted, “Backed by the support of today’s top electronics and materials companies, the flexible displays and microelectronics roadmap looks promising and is soon to become a reality. It’s exciting to see the progress that has been made just within the last year alone, progress that would not have been possible without the collaboration between these industry players, government and academia.”
This year’s three-day conference was co-sponsored by Applied Films, the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Covion, DisplaySearch, Dow Corning, Kodak, 3M, Philips, Hewlett-Packard and Universal Display Corporation.
Conference Highlights
Kicking off the conference, Kyuha Chung from Samsung Electronics delivered the keynote address, which focused on the industry’s flexible display R&D efforts, target applications, technology needs and critical issues that need to be resolved. Chung also highlighted current market research, which suggests that flexible displays will represent an impressive $9.7 billion in revenues (comprising of more than 10 percent of the FPD market) by 2010.
This year, participants also heard from more than 40 of today’s leading experts and participated in Q&A breakout sessions to explore a number of key topics such as markets and applications, flexible display technologies and substrates, flexible backplanes and thin-film transistors, barrier films and other materials and manufacturing technology.
These presentations and an open forum discussion revealed that while progress has been made, issues such as heat resistant plastic or metal foils, lower processing temperatures (below 200 C) and continued development of barrier layers are among the points impacting acceleration efforts. But, to this end, as R&D continues to make significant strides, it’s evident that there are more flexible display frontplane choices, including electrophoretic, organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), cholosteric liquid crystal displays (LCDs), and amorphous silicon LCD.
For the last several years, USDC has championed the research and development efforts to further the flexible displays and microelectronics manufacturing supply chain. This consortium is currently funding almost $40 million in R&D projects, with more than 25 companies, including GE, National Starch, Cabot, Dow Chemical, Symmorphix, Dow Corning, Litrex, OEM Press Systems, Potomac Photonics, Sencera, Applied Photonics, CHA Industries, Kurt J. Lesker Company, Azores Corporation, General Atomics, MicroContinuum, Energy Conversion Devices, Vitex Systems and Binghamton University.
Wrapping up this year’s conference, the U.S. Army and Arizona State University held a ceremony to commemorate the opening of its 250,000 square-foot Flexible Display Center. Announced last year, the opening of the FPC marks a significant milestone for the flexible display industry and is the culmination of academia, industry and government collaboration focused on advancing full color flexible display manufacturing for realization of military, and, eventually, commercial applications.
A CD-ROM containing the complete set of conference presentations may be ordered by downloading the order form from this page. The purchase price is $395.00 (U.S.)
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