July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—David Allee from the Flexible display Center at Arizona State University described the past and current efforts in flexible display research. As TFTs move from amorphous silicon to metal oxide as the base material, the challenges of higher levels of integration become clear. The InGaZnO materials are mostly settling…
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Shelby Nelson from Eastman Kodak described ongoing experiments with equipment, materials, and process design to create vertical thin-film transistors. Their work is based on a variant of atomic layer deposition that reduces the influence of lithography on device geometries. Their work in ALD has given rise to a spatial…
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Chan-Long Shieh from CBRITE described the efforts in moving metal oxide TFTs (MOTFT) into production on flexible plastic substrates. The issues in moving a technology from a rigid substrate to a flexible one are not insurmountable, but require much more research. The motivation for the work is to address…
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Ritwik Bhatia from Cambridge NanoTech described the details of processing engineered materials in atomic layer granularity. This process allows for the conformal coating of materials on to a substrate a layer of material at a time. Atomic layer deposition is a process that uses a number of precursor materials,…
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—David Barnes from Bizwitz talked about the various technologies and the challenges associated with them as new materials and use patterns come into being. At the same time, he cautioned that very little is actually new. Displays depend on the characteristics of the front plane and the drive electronics….
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Neil Morrison from Applied Materials described the changes in the industry and their efforts to provide production ready equipment for these new technologies. Although applied has been instrumental in driving transistor dimensions down into the nanometer range, they also are working in the other direction for LCD and PV…
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Robert Street from PARC described a flexible X-ray image sensor using organic TFTs. This is yet another new technology from the research center that invented Ethernet, GUIs, and the mouse. Digital X-ray imaging uses indirect detection to capture scintillation from phosphors in a photodiode. In radiometry, the imaging process…