The use of mobile devices has been a tremendous area of growth, and trends indicate that tablets and smart phones will continue to take market share away from the PC business.

However, consumers are always looking for the next best products which improve quality of life – both at work and at play. For mobile devices, the major limitation is the display size. As wonderful as watching videos on your smart phone is, a larger display would be a big improvement. However, at the same time, consumers still want the smallest, lightest device possible.

In essence, making larger displays fit smaller devices is where the display market has to be heading, and Polymer Vision has a jump on the competition. Born out of the Philips Electronics labs and now a subsidiary of Wistron, a leading Taiwanese original device manufacture (ODM), Polymer Vision’s stated mission is “to put a rollable display in every mobile device.”

In recent years, Polymer Vision has developed major technology breakthroughs, utilizing highly flexible organic materials to create thin film transistors (TFT) on ultra-thin plastic. This includes demonstrating the technology capabilities through prototype rollable display enabled e-Reader devices.

“Our original technology building blocks were developed by Philips in the 1990s,” Karl McGoldrick, Polymer Vision’s CEO, said. “By 2000, we had developed flexible semiconductor materials suitable for making displays. By 2004, we had advanced to developing flexible displays you could wrap around your finger.”

However, Philips decided to focus on core businesses, and spun Polymer Vision out in 2006. With the backing of Wistron, which acquired Polymer Vision in 2009, the company is now ready for mass production

“With Wistron, we have been able to strengthen our organization” McGoldrick noted, “as well as prove the technology scalability on the recently acquired G2.5 AMLCD line”.

Polymer Vision is now well positioned to move its rollable technology forward. Its first generation products include 5” and 6” display modules. These enable both glass-free rugged eReaders, as well as foldable eReaders, where the display is twice the size of the product itself. These displays are geared toward EPD (Electrophoretic) front planes, such as E Ink and SiPix.

“Lots of people are talking about ‘flexible’ displays,” McGoldrick said. “These offer credit card type flexibility, where the displays are rugged. Polymer Vision offers even more, with the ability to fold and roll the displays. This is a huge advantage for product designers – and it solves the problem of getting larger displays into smaller devices.

“Our first generation is ready for production,” McGoldrick added. “The displays pass aggressive lifetime tests, including the ball drop test. So they are rugged and reliable while also being lighter and thinner. In that sense things are going well, – but we are not stopping at grayscale. We are also developing foldable, rollable full color video displays based on technologies such as OLED and Electrowetting.”

McGoldrick envisions the day when displays are more than three times the size of the mobile device itself. “My view of the future is that people won’t talk about mobile devices as we know them today. They will talk about “mobile displays” where all that is needed is the high-speed connection to ‘the cloud,’” he said. “Hardware space will be saved through a reduced need for things like memory storage and power sapping processors. The device then simply becomes your mobile window to the cloud, with instant access to personal content in the vast world of the internet.

“These new products have to be ultra-mobile” McGoldrick continued. “Larger displays fitting into smaller devices are only possible when the display can be bendable and rollable. Let’s get an iPad-sized display into an iPhone-sized device. Then we have the best of both worlds.

“Today we can offer display and device manufacturers a unique display technology that enables a 6” eReader to be folded into a smart phone sized device. We also have leading edge EPD image performance, with 32 grey levels, and touchscreen,” McGoldrick said.

“When we first demonstrated our concept, people wanted to know if we could prove that the technology is as good as we said it is, and if it is scalable to high volumes. We have proven both,” McGoldrick concluded. “And now, as we watch others desperately trying to close the gap between smartphone and tablet, we know we are in an exciting space.”