Scientists are developing a new electronic
"paper" - ultra-thin, flexible
displays that are highly energy
efficient and work well even in bright light,
such as out in the Sun.
Less than a micrometre thin, bendable and giving all the
colours that a
regular LED display does, it still needs ten times less energy
than a Kindle tablet,
researchers said.
The best application for the displays will
be well-lit places such as outside
or in public places to display information,
they said.
This could reduce the energy consumption
and at the same time replace
signs and information screens that are not
currently electronic today with
more flexible ones, they said.
Andreas Dahlin and Kunli Xiong from
Chalmers University of
Technology in Sweden, who were working on placing
conductive
polymers on nanostructures, found that the combination would be
perfect for creating electronic displays as thin as paper.
"The 'paper' is similar to the Kindle
tablet. It isn't lit up like a
standard display, but rather reflects the
external light which illuminates it,"
said Dahlin.
"Therefore it works very well where
there is bright light, such as
out in the sun, in contrast to standard LED
displays that work best in darkness,"
he said.
"At the same time it needs only a
tenth of the energy that a Kindle tablet
uses, which itself uses much less
energy than a tablet LED display," he added.
It all depends on the polymers' ability to
control how light is absorbed and
reflected. The polymers that cover the whole
surface lead the electric
signals throughout the full display and create images
in high resolution.
The material is not yet ready for
application, but the basis is there.
The team has tested and built a few
pixels.
These use the same red, green and blue
(RGB) colours that together
can create all the colours in standard LED
displays.
The results so far have been positive, what
remains now is to build
pixels that cover an area as large as a display.
"We are working at a fundamental level but even so,
the step to
manufacturing a product out of it shouldn't be too far away,"
Dahlin said.
One obstacle today is that there is gold
and silver in the display, which makes the
manufacturing expensive. "The gold surface is 20 nanometres
thick so there is not
that much gold in it," said Dahlin.
"But at present there is a lot of gold wasted in manufacturing it. Either
we reduce the
waste or we find another way to decrease the manufacturing cost," he said.
Source | Journal Advanced Materials
Mohd Tasvirul Islam
TGT (LIS)
