Season 4 - Episode #5 - Bend me, shape me: Flexible organic LCDs and optics

Up for discussion will be flexible displays and optics, looking at activating surfaces in our daily lives with organic electronics; We’ll be asking what is ‘Organic LCD’, why it’s needed and where it fits alongside other display technologies such as flexible OLED; and the economic and sustainability factors involved in the use of plastic over glass.

FlexEnable was spun-out of Cambridge University with a focus on using organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) to replace glass in large area electronics with organic optoelectronic modules which are flexible, ultra-thin, ultra-light and unbreakable. Today the company has over 1,000 patent applications globally for OTFT materials, processes and architectures (including 103 patent applications that originated from the University of Cambridge).

Many of the advantages of FlexEnable’s OTFT technology derive from its low temperature manufacturing process, bringing significant process simplicity and cost advantages compared to other approaches. FlexEnable has industrialised OTFT with high yield and reliability, and has continued to improve the OTFT platform to where it is now - three times more powerful than the most common glass/amorphous silicon TFT technology - while bringing all of the benefits of removing glass.