Universal Display Corporation and LG.Philips LCD Co., Ltd. have developed a flexible, full-color, active-matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) display. Flexible metal foil offers a number of desirable advantages that include enhanced thermal and mechanical durability, which is a crucial characteristic for high-temperature, TFT (thin film transistor) processing, and will be potentially lower in cost, compared to the flexible plastic substrates available today.

The display prototype is a portrait-configured, 4-inch QVGA, 100-ppi, full-color OLED display. This razor-thin display was built on 76-micron thick metal foil (0.076 mm) and offers 256 grey scale levels per color (8 bit). The display can portray a variety of images, including full-motion video.

This prototype is said to be the world's first high-resolution AMOLED built on flexible metal foil using amorphous-Silicon (a-Si) backplane technology. It combines LPL's a-Si backplane technology adapted to metal foil with Universal Display's proprietary high-efficiency PHOLED and FOLED flexible technologies. This flexible metal foil prototype, with its extremely thin, lightweight and rugged form factor, represents a major step toward the demonstration of the commercial viability of such products.

This demonstration is also important in that it provides further evidence that highly efficient PHOLED technology may enable the use of a-Si backplane technology for AMOLEDs. While many in the industry have focused on the value that poly-Silicon technology would bring to AMOLEDs, a much larger a-Si TFT manufacturing base and lower cost structure would make a-Si technology an attractive backplane option for AMOLEDs.

OLEDs offer numerous advantages when compared to today's LCDs, including thinner form factor, a more vivid visual appearance and, when using Universal Display's PHOLED technology, lower power consumption.

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