What is holding back flexible OLED displays?

Published: October 24, 2011    Category: Advanced Materials OLED Lighting

It has long been the dram of the OLED industry to provide high quality, low cost flexible panels manufactured using R2R processes on plastic substrates.  What has held back their commercialization?  Certainly, there are several factors that have kept flexible OLEDs from becoming anything other than a dream, from the dearth of suitable substrates to the (near) nonexistence of flexible backplanes.  But lack of adequate encapsulation technologies is also a key factor, because the viability of flexible OLEDs built on inexpensive porous plastics relies on the ability to encapsulate them with adequate environmental barriers.

Many flexible encapsulation prototypes exist, such as flexible glass and multilayer dyad films on plastic, but the performance of these technologies is still very much unproven in the real world.  The ability to use these flexible encapsulation products to manufacture truly flexible displays on a large scale, with reasonable manufacturing yields and costs, remains elusive.  Clearly, suppliers of encapsulation technologies still have much work to do in order to achieve true flexibility in products that also provide the required water vapor and oxygen barrier performance.

But if highly flexible (rollable or crushable) encapsulation of OLEDs is too far down the road to be much of a factor in the OLED encapsulation market today, are there other, more near-term opportunities?  We think the answer is yes; firms may be able to increase revenues through sales of partially flexible, or bendable displays.

There is great potential for encapsulation firms to commercialize better flexible encapsulation technologies based on, for example, flexible glass, multilayer dyad laminates, and even conformal coating technologies.  But firms should not necessarily aim too high at this point: partial flexibility, if it can be delivered at low cost and with excellent barrier performance, may be more than enough to enable growth in the important OLED lighting and TV markets, and thus grow sales for encapsulation suppliers.

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