OLED technology enables the production of displays that deliver significant advantages over traditional liquid-crystal displays, including a wider viewing angle, bright and vivid images, quicker response times and lighter weight. Perhaps most significantly, OLEDs are more adaptive to manufacture on flexible (plastic, metal foil) substrates, potentially creating displays that can be bent or rolled for easy transport and are much more rugged. Also, unlike LCDs, OLEDs are an emissive technology, so they require no auxiliary light source, such as backlighting or reflection of ambient light, thus enabling thinner, more compact displays. Eventually, OLEDs are likely to challenge LCDs in a range of products: PDAs, digital cameras, desktop monitors and TVs, assuming competitive costs are achieved. Already, new cell phones, car audio systems and other consumer products currently on the drawing board are incorporating OLEDs into their designs.

To speed commercialization of flexible displays, the Army Research Laboratory and Natick Soldier Systems Center, in cooperation with the United States Display Consortium and its member companies, is creating an initiative chartered with research and development of flexible display technology-starting with contourable, bendable, rollable displays designed for military applications. Called the Flexible Display Initiative (FDI), this effort will focus on both emissive and reflective display and TFT backplane technologies that are compatible with manufacture on flexible substrates. FDI will provide funding for the R&D needed to accelerate development, ideally enabling the Army to field demonstrator displays in 2007-08.

Michael Ciesinski is president and chief executive officer of the U.S. Display Consortium (USDC) in San Jose, Calif.