Transistors and other circuitry can then be printed on to a flexible plastic substrate.
Using flexible plastic instead would be lighter, cheaper and less likely to break in a laptop computer that was dropped.
Pigment in millions of bubbles moving around in this way create the images of letters that can be displayed on flexible plastic sheets.
But it is possible to lay down a thin layer of silicon on a flexible plastic sheet, through a process called vacuum deposition.
Peruvemba expects flexible plastic displays to get larger in coming years, to the point that they can be used in e-book readers and laptop computers.
The goal is to use flexible plastic circuits to recreate all the basic functions of the human body, from digestion to breathing and everything in between.
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In addition, the OLEDs can be fabricated onto a flexible plastic substrate rather than a rigid glass layer, making it easier to manufacture them into a curved screen.
After all, the concept - creating flexible electronics and assembling them on equally flexible plastic - has been touted since the 1960s, when the first flexible solar cell arrays appeared.
More than 20 million flexible plastic displays are on the market today, according to Sriram Peruvemba, vice-president of marketing for E Ink, the company that developed the low-power display technology for the Amazon Kindle and many other e-book readers.
However with the introduction of lighter weight and more flexible plastic substrate magnetic tapes, combined with a vacuum column to control the tension that the magnetic tape experiences during use, the IBM 726 was a prototype of the modern digital tape recording system.
Initially, the idea was to use plastic flexible displays (as evidenced by previous XO 3.0 renders), but degradation caused by the sun's UV rays and plastic's easily scratched surface forced the company to switch gears and use glass instead.
Lucent's 30, 000 techies work on such advances as plastic fiber flexible enough to wire your home, a new over-the-air laser system for local optical transmission and routers with mind-boggling capacity.
Phthalates have long been used as a way to make plastic soft and flexible.
The sensor itself is a strip of plastic filled with flexible sensors connected to a small microcontroller module with three indicator LEDs and a micro-USB port.
One way around this is to devise novel transistors that are themselves made of plastic, and therefore flexible.
New plastic fiber will be flexible and durable enough to wrap around desks and plug into PCs--ideal for the home.
With technology from Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, E-Ink recently demonstrated a prototype of a flexible page display that was driven by plastic transistors.
By replacing the glass sheets with plastic, Rolltronics plans to manufacture a flexible version of this memory using a roll-to-roll process.
Last May, Plastic Logic demonstrated a paper-like flexible screen capable of playing video in colour, which is achieved by placing a filter on top of the original black-and-white display.
Phthalates, the chemicals that make a PVC container flexible, "can migrate out of the plastic when it's heated, " says Dr. Halden, who has done comprehensive studies on emerging contaminants and plastics for more than a decade.
"Our new PSCs are made from plastic-like materials and are lightweight and flexible, " he said.
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Work at Bell Labs has also shown that, besides printing and spraying, flexible circuits can be stamped continuously on to rolls of plastic.
Researchers at HP continued their work scaling up flexible display drivers made from thin films of silicon on rolls of plastic.
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The leads also need to be flexible enough to deal with the large thermal expansion of the chip relative to the plastic on which it is mounted yet another engineering headache.
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