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Light-Emitting Polymer Displays
BlackSol writes "Yahoo is covering a very cool piece on the development of roll-up screens. Possible uses from home televisions, to tele-watches, and military uses such as real-time satalite fed maps in the field."
I wonder if these can get high enough res. to be useful for laptop/handheld displays? That would sure be handy...
-Zordok
according to this (rather old (2001)) paper, lifetime of polymer dislpays is around 10.000 hours against usual TFTs living around 50.000 hours.
Let's assume they doubled it since 2001, its 20.000 hours.
Unless they produce them for the half of the costs of usual TFTs, I wouldn't like to throw away my TV every 2 1/3 years...
This is Cambrige Display Technology's white paper on how Light Emitting Polymers function.
It's not just the individual pixels which are made with polymers. It's the individual traces also. In fact, the whole field of polymer semiconducters is starting to ripen and bear fruit. The sheets of plastic they print won't only have light emitting portions, it can include power traces and even decoding logic! There might be a copper ribbon cable to connect the entire display to whatever external source provides data and power. But the entire display will be made from polymers.
This really is amazing technology. The circuitry is basically printed out using ink jet style heads. Actually, one of the article says that it actually plots the traces out ala a good old fasioned plotter as opposed to line-by-line like a printer. It's not hard to imagine that this stuff will lead to a rebirth of the homebrew electronics hobbyist. Even if you couldn't afford to buy your own plotter, a prototyping shop which owned one should be able to produce custom circuits to your own design in an extremely fast and cheap manner. Imagine a semi-conductor Kinkos! Could be cool stuff.
Actually the minimum is not x*y it's x+y(well 3x+y anyway, or better x+3y for rgb). If you imagine all other contions being set to high impedance. One pair at a time used to illuminate a pixel and a scanning techinque used. That only makes it 3328 connections.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Most of the posts here assume plastic = transparent. Yeah, that would be nice. But it's not necessarily the case here. Nothing in the article suggests that this display is transparent.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
The issue isn't signal delivery, it's pixel addressing. To get the right charges to the right place for production of the image.
CRT's (TV's and Monitors) fire a magnetically redirected electron beam for its addressing. This makes it a very analoque device when you break it down, albeit a very high precission one.
LCD's are addressed via a crosshatch scheme and do have actual pixels for a change.
Unless that crosshatch or something similar can be reproduced, then yes it will take a high wire:pixel ration to get the job done.
Any spoon would be too big.
I did a lay report on this subject a few years ago for a university project. Have a read; I wrote it with a view to be easily digestible for the general masses :)
w illiamson/index.html
http://www.chemsoc.org/exemplarchem/entries/2001/
You will need a Chime plugin for viewing the 3D molecules.
http://www.mdlchime.com/chime/
regards,
Mark
The BBC's Radio channel 'Radio 4' featured CDT in their 'Material World' programme on 11 July. It can be heard here using a Real Audio player. The web-page summarising this transmission is here.