U.S. firms aim for organic thin film color displays

By
iApplianceWeb
(11/01/02, 02:41:14 AM EDT)

New York, N.Y. --- DuPont Displays, Sarnoff Corp. and Bell Labs have agreed to cooperate to develop new organic thin-film transistor (organic-TFT) technology on plastic substrates. The research to develop flexible displays will be sponsored by the federal government for three years by the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Advanced Technology Program.

The collaboration combines DuPont's expertise in organic LED panels, flexible substrates, cost-effective printing and organic-TFT technologies with Sarnoff's expertise in active-matrix TFT designs and video display systems, the companies said in a statement Tuesday (Oct. 29). Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs will develop a new class of organic-TFT materials and design processes.

The companies seek to create flexible organic-TFT technology, which has the potential to dramatically reduce the cost of display backplanes while enabling the fabrication of lower cost flexible display devices. Standard silicon-based TFT backplane manufacturing is a costly process requiring billion-dollar facilities, the companies said. The current process is inherently incompatible with the production of flexible plastic substrates because it involves multiple high-temperature vacuum deposition and photolithography steps that are hostile to a plastic substrate, the companies said.

OLED panels are emissive, eliminating the need for the backlight required in other display technologies such as liquid-crystal displays.

"With high-caliber collaborators like DuPont, Sarnoff and Bell Labs working together, we are accelerating efforts toward commercializing moldable display devices with full-color video capability," said Dalen Keys, research and development leader for DuPont Displays, in a statement. "With the combined skills, knowledge and capabilities of all three organizations, this partnership has the potential to revolutionize the displays industry."

"Organic-TFTs have the potential to transform the industry from a capital-intensive batch process on glass to a much lower cost, higher throughput process compatible with plastic substrates," said Ray Camisa, vice president of technology operations at Sarnoff Corp.

Details on the cooperative agreement were not made available.

For more information about the issues, products and technologies in this story, go to the  iAppliance Web Views  page and call up the associatively-linked XML/Java Web map of the iApplianceWeb site and search for product information since the beginning of 2002.

For technical article coverage, go to EETimes In Focus maps on the same Web page and browse or quickly search for all articles on a particular topic since the beginning of 1998.

These Web Maps can be browsed by date, by category, by title, or by keyword, with results displayed instantly either as a list of possible hits or with the specific Web page.