Oxford spin-out develops new display production method

Traditionally, many electronic devices such as displays have been manufactured using vacuum and vapour deposition-based processes. While these have proved sufficient to meet the needs of today’s marketplace, many companies are now developing solution-based manufacturing processing techniques that will offer some distinct advantages.

Not only will these upcoming processing methods be simpler and more cost effective than existing techniques, they will also enable manufacturers to build electronic systems such as flexible displays from organic thin film transistors.

Inorganic thin-film transistors have already been widely used in liquid-crystal televisions, where they are deployed to drive pixels on the display. Such thin-film transistors are made by depositing thin films of an active layer of semiconductor material, as well as a dielectric layer and metallic contacts over a supporting rigid substrate.

But while next-generation displays will also use arrays of such transistors to drive individual pixel elements, they will be constructed from organic semiconductor materials deposited onto a flexible substrate, rather than a rigid one, using solution processing manufacturing techniques instead.