The quickening pace of innovation in flat-panel display technology will make possible the development of flexible displays sooner rather than later.
But users will still have to wait for nearly a decade before large, full-colour flexible displays become commercially available, according to researchers at Taiwan"s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). At the government-backed R&D organisation"s Electronics Research and Services Organisation (ERSO) researchers are working on the development of displays based on flexible polymer substrates - rather than the rigid glass substrates currently used to produce flat-panel displays - and TFT-LCD and organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) technologies.