Our obsession with making gadgetry ever smaller was challenged by the arrival of the smartphone. The rise in screen quality, made necessary by the phone’s ability to play video for example, created something of a conundrum: how do you make a device that is small enough to be easily portable but has a screen that doesn’t leave you squinting? After all, while TVs have got thinner they certainly haven’t got smaller. The answer, it seems, is the flexible display. If you can have a large screen that folds away after use then the problem is solved. While it is a simple enough idea, the ability to take this from concept to product is less so. Humans Invent met up with the Research Director of Sharp Laboratories Europe, Mike Brownlow, to get an insight into the future of bendy screens.
Flexible or conformable?
When trying to understand flexible displays Brownlow points out one, often confused, distinction. He says, “There is the truly flexible screen, this is the concept of the roller display that is more portable and can be unrolled. There is also a type which is not really flexible but best described as conformable. These displays can take non-planar shapes that give the benefit of, say, having an inwardly curved display or such like.”
Fold away
The ultimate goal when it comes to flexible displays, on the other hand, is to enable a smartphone that can be folded or rolled away into something very small indeed. Brownlow says, “There are several concepts around, such as a pen with the display rolled around or a phone where you pull out the display, but something like this is more at the conceptual stage.” In the quest for a good quality, flexible display, Brownlow believes that the use of OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology will be the way to go.
Thin-film transistors
Interestingly, in 1995 Brownlow and his team came up with a concept at Sharp called SURF BAUD, which, even at a time when the internet was fairly nascent, foresaw the importance of improving mobile phone displays. The design they came up with is not too far from the smartphone displays in use today. He continues, “Sharp worked with Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (who they are currently working with on flexible displays) to develop the thin-film transistor technology and here at SLE we focused on the architecture, how to drive it, sensors and such like but that was quite some time ago now.”
It is strange to think that in a further 15 years time, as we unfurl our flexible displays to watch season 98 of Mad Men, we’ll look back at the smartphones of today like we did at the snake-gaming Nokia 6110 of the 1990s.
