UK manufacturer FlexEnable has designed a new type of material that can replace glass in electronic displays. Dan Robinson finds out from CEO Chuck Milligan how the technology offers greater flexibility in deploying interactive screens in cars, wearables and medical devices.
From the Ford Mustang to the Tesla Model 3, there’s been no small amount of change in the cars we’ve driven over the past half a century. Yet while the electric windows, air conditioning and keyless entry systems in today’s vehicles illustrate the automotive evolution, there are small details that have remained as intact as their four wheels.
Every car coming off the production line today continues to have a screen in the middle of the dashboard that, for the most part, is the only point of command when it comes to entertainment, viewing rear cameras, and information for weather and traffic information.
Flexible OLCD – FlexEnable’s glass-free organic LCD (OLCD) delivers high-brightness, long lifetime flexible displays that are low cost and scalable to large areas, while also being thin, lightweight, and shatterproof.
OLCD is a plastic display technology with full color and video-rate capability. It enables product companies to create striking designs and realize novel use cases by merging the display into the product design rather than accommodating it by the design.
Is better suited than flexible OLED to applications across large-area consumer electronics, smart home appliances, automotive, notebooks and tablets, and digital signage.
Some advantages:
- OLCD can be conformed and wrapped around surfaces and cut into non-rectangular shapes during the production process. Holes can be also added to fit around the functional design of the system – for example around knobs and switches.
- OLCD can be made ultra-bright for viewing in daylight conditions without affecting the display lifetime – an important requirement for vehicle surface-integrated displays.
- OLCD is the lowest cost flexible display technology – it is three to four times lower cost that flexible OLED today. This is because it makes use of existing display factories and supply chain and deploys a low temperature process that results in low manufacturing costs and high yield.
- OLCD is naturally scalable to large sizes. It can be made as small or as large as the manufacturing equipment used for flat panel displays allows.
- Flexibility of OLCD allows an ultra-narrow bezel to be implemented by folding down the borders behind the display.
- OLCD is the key to the fabrication of ultra-high contrast dual cell displays with true pixel level dimming, offering OLED-like performance at a fraction of the cost. The extremely thin OLCD substrate brings advantages in cost, viewing angle and module thickness compared to glass displays. At the same time OLCD retains the flexibility required for applications such as surface-integrated automotive displays.
- Due to its unique properties, OLCD has the potential to transform how and where displays are used in products. The videos below give a glimpse into this innovative technology.
OLCD brings the benefits of being thin, light, shatterproof and conformable, while offering the same quality and performance as traditional glass LCDs. The mechanical advantages of plastic OLCD over glass LCD are further enhanced by the technology’s excellent optical performance, much of which originates from the extreme thinness of plastic TAC substrates compared to glass.
For more information Click https://www.flexenable.com/technology/flexible-olcd/ or go to https://www.ns-businesshub.com/transport/flexenable-olcd-displays/ for more information.
