Researchers have developed electronic ‘paper’ that is less than a micrometre thin and works like a Kindle tablet – but requires far less energy.
The bendable display reflects light to produce as many colours as an
LED Screen Module, and unlike the latter, it thrives in brightly lit areas.
The team has so far built and tested a few pixels of the material, and while it’s not yet ready for application, they say manufacturing a product with the display is likely soon to come.
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology stumbled upon the combination to create the electronic display while working on placing conductive polymers on nanostructures.
The thin, flexible material relies on the polymers’ ability to control how light is absorbed and reflected.
These polymers cover the surface of the material, and guide electric signals throughout the
outdoor full color LED display to create high resolution images.
The results are described in a paper published to the journal Advanced Materials.
‘The “paper” is similar to the Kindle tablet,’ says Andreas Dahlin.
‘It isn’t lit up like a standard display, but rather reflects the external light which illuminates it. Therefore it works very well where there is bright light, such as out in the sun, in contrast to standard LED displays that work best in darkness.
‘At the same time it needs only a tenth of the energy that a Kindle tablet uses, which itself uses much less energy than a tablet LED display.’
According to the researchers, the samples they've so far built and tested use the same red, green, and blue colours which combine to give LEDs their vibrant displays.
Moving forward, they will build pixels to cover much larger areas.
‘We are working at a fundamental level but even so, the step to manufacturing a product out of it shouldn’t be too far away,’ Dahlin says.
‘What we need now are engineers.’
This type of material could be used outside for public displays, the researcher says, helping to reduce energy consumption and upgrade signs and information screens to be both electric and flexible.
The researchers are working to improve their design, which currently uses gold and silver, and would thus be expensive to manufacture.
‘The gold surface is 20 nanometres thick so there is not that much gold in it,’ says Dahlin.
‘But at present there is a lot of gold wasted in manufacturing it. Either we reduce the waste or we find another way to decrease the manufacturing cost.’
