| Display Backplanes |
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One great area of opportunity for organic electronics is the manufacture of backplane circuits for flexible displays. Most modern display technologies consist of two main parts: a frontplane, which forms the actual image; and a backplane, which controls which pixels in the frontplane get turned on and off. A number of different frontplane technologies currently exist, each with their own benefits. Electrophoretic displays like E-Paper and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), all of which offer significant benefits over conventional display technology, such as lower energy consumption, better contrast, lower manufacturing costs, and material flexibility. The ReadiusTM - a foldable e-reader - is a perfect example of the new applications that are possible with this technology. Yet despite these benefits, the full power of these technologies is not currently being exploited due to the need for conventional electronics technology in the backplanes, making them more expensive, un-printable, and inflexible. By designing flexible materials that can be used in these backplanes, we can enable commercially-viable, fully-flexible displays.
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