Flexible display
[2] Technologies involved in building a rollable display include electronic ink, Gyricon, Organic LCD, and OLED.
At CES 2006, Philips showed a rollable display prototype, with a screen capable of retaining an image for several months without electricity.
[5] Gyricon LLC's operations were short lived and in December 2005 Xerox closed the subsidiary company in a move to focus on licensing the technology instead.
[11] Between 2008–2012, ARL committed to further sponsorship of ASU’s Flexible Display Center, which included an additional $50 million in research funding.
[20] In 2004, a team led by Prof. Roel Vertegaal at Queen's University's Human Media Lab in Canada developed PaperWindows,[21] the first prototype bendable paper computer and first Organic User Interface.
[28] Research and development into flexible OLED displays largely began in the late 2000s with the main intentions of implementing this technology in mobile devices.
[30] Though the focus of the Morph was to demonstrate the potential of nanotechnology, it pioneered the concept of utilizing a flexible video display in a consumer electronics device.
[32] The Kinetic proved to be a large departure from the Morph physically, but it still incorporated Nokia's vision of polymorphism in mobile devices.
[33] In partnership with RIKEN (the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research), Sony promised to commercialize this technology in TVs and cellphones sometime around 2010.
[36] During the 2011 Q3 quarterly earnings call, Samsung’s vice president of investor relations, Robert Yi, confirmed the company’s intentions of applying the technology and releasing products utilizing it by early 2012.
[37] In January 2012 Samsung acquired Liquavista, a company with expertise in manufacturing flexible displays, and announced plans to begin mass production by Q2 2012.
[38][39] In January 2013, Samsung exposed its brand new, unnamed product during the company's keynote address at CES in Las Vegas.
[40] During Samsung's CES 2013 keynote presentation, two prototype mobile devices codenamed "Youm" that incorporated the flexible AMOLED display technology were shown to the public.
[46] During a developer conference in 2018, Samsung showed a foldable smartphone prototype, which was subsequently revealed in February 2019 as the Galaxy Fold.
[49] On 30 May, in partnership with Army Research Lab scientists, ASU announced that it has successfully manufactured the world's largest flexible OLED display using thin-film transistor (TFTs) technology.
Flexible displays have many advantages over glass: better durability, lighter weight, thinner as plastic, and can be perfectly curved and used in many devices.
The SAIL process gets around this by ‘printing’ the semiconductor pattern on a fully composed substrate, so that the layers always remain in perfect alignment.
In April 2013 in Paris, the Human Media Lab, in collaboration with Plastic Logic, unveiled the world's first actuated flexible smartphone prototype, MorePhone.
[31] The flexible OLED display allows users to interact with the phone by twisting, bending, squeezing and folding in different manners across both the vertical and horizontal planes.
[60] The technology journalist website Engadget described interactions such as "[when] bend the screen towards yourself, [the device] acts as a selection function, or zooms in on any pictures you're viewing.
"[31] At CES 2013, Samsung showcased the two handsets which incorporates AMOLED flexible display technology during its keynote presentation, the Youm and an unnamed Windows Phone 8 prototype device.
[62][63] The Youm possessed a static implementation of flexible AMOLED display technology, as its screen has a set curvature along one of its edges.
"[59] The unnamed Windows Phone 8 prototype device was composed of a solid base from that extends a flexible AMOLED display.
