Flexible display using OLEDs

In breaking the convention of flat panel displays by replacing them with rollable, flexible, stretchable, bendable, foldable displays, OLEDs has a major role to play. These are tiny Light Emitting Diodes small enough to design flexible panels. Apart from making gadgets more stylish and giving gadget freaks goose bumps; this makes them sort of more wearable. They have been used in Samsung  YOUM, and have a world of possible applications. But a thing that has to be kept in mind that a flexible display does not essentially mean a flexible/bendable phone. Why? ….Simply because apart from making the screen flexible what we need to make a phone flexible is a bendable battery which is not that easier to make.

 

SAMSUNG YOUM flexible display

So candidates like LG G flex and Samsung Galaxy round exist but they are not bendable but “bent”, i.e. they have a permanently bent structure which makes them less prone to breaks, and provides easier handling (God knows how they figure out that a bent phone is easier to handle!)

LG G flex

Moreover LG G flex is not released yet, and Samsung GALAXY round is released is in Korea only, as if the companies know that they won’t be a giant success in the market.

One more rumor surrounded that Samsung is going to release galaxy skin which ultimately turned out to be a concept phone. 

Samsung skin (that turned out to be aconcept phone!)

The youm flexible screen concept by Samsung can only be used to make the screen flexible but the phone will remain stone- hard.

Therefore as long as some nanomaterials like graphene is not extensively researched to provide a corporate model of feasibility; flexible phones are not coming to your hands.

 Coming to the point, what makes an OLED or Organic LED small enough..? 

Unlike a conventional LED which is simply a p-n junction diode in which the wavelength emitted during recombination of hole and electron is in the range of visibility, OLED is a stack of layers of organic polymers which emit light when current flows through it.

It has a cathode, an anode an emissive layer, a conductive layer and two more layers of some transparent material like glass (sometimes a single layer of glass and other layer is of some other opaque material, if it’s an OLED that transmits light only one way.)

These layers can be covered on surfaces and most notably can even be printed using ink-jet printers! This promises that in future they are going to be very economical in building the next generation of televisions.  But until now probably owing to the lack of specialized infrastructure that is there only for LCD or LED screens they cost a bit higher. But still OLED televisions have arrived in the market and are possibly here to stay.