Sony announced today that it developed a super-flexible 80 μm-thick 4.1-in 121 ppi OTFT-driven (organic thin-film transistors) full color OLED display which can be wrapped around a thin cylinder.

To create the display, Sony developed OTFTs with an original organic semiconductor material (a PXX derivative) with eight times the current modulation of conventional OTFTs. This was achived due to the development of integration technologies of OTFTs and OLEDs on an ultra-thin 20 μm thick flexible substrate (a flexible on-panel gate-driver circuit with OTFTs which is able to get rid of convetinal rigid driver IC chips interfering roll-up of a display) and soft organic insulators for all the insulators in the integration cuircuit.

The improvement of the OTFT enabled the integration of a flexible gate-driver circuit with OTFTs on a display panel. The roll-up capability is possible because the rigid driver IC chips has been removed from the display.

In order to enhance flexibility of the display, Sony has developed organic insulators for all the insulators in the OTFT and OLED integration circuit. These organic insulators can be formed with the solution process in the atmosphere which is requires fewer steps, and consumes materials and energy more efficiently - thus has a smaller environmental footprint - compared to the conventional high temperature vacuum semiconductor process which use inorganic/silicon materials.

Sony claims that the OTFT-driven OLED display with the aforementioned technologies can reproduce moving images while rolled-up around a cylinder with a radius of 4 mm, according to Sony. Even after 1000 cycles of repeatedly rolling-up and stretching the display, there was no clear degradation in the display's ability to reproduce moving images, Sony said.

The company will unveil the results of this development on May 27 at "SID (Society for Information Display) 2010 International Symposium" in Seattle, WA (May 23-28).