Center makes flexible display screens for Army

It’s a modest beginning, but it could be the start of something big. The Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University Research Park in Tempe has produced its first flexible display screens under a $43.7 million contract with the U.S. Army to develop advanced computer screens that bend.

The first displays were only a little more than one inch diagonally in size, and they only produced black and white images. But it’s a start.

Greg Raupp, director of the center, thinks flexible screens — rugged, lightweight and low power consuming — will be the next revolution in information display technology.

“The last revolution was moving from CRTs (cathode ray tubes) to flat panel displays,” he said. “What we are accomplishing here will be the equivalent of that or greater.”

That’s because information displays that bend can be placed on any curved surface, including clothing, he said.

The Army is interested in battery-powered flexible displays for soldiers of the future to wear on a sleeve or carry in a pocket. Using a wireless connection, the warrior could quickly gain electronic access to battle information through maps, images or text displayed on the flexible screen.

But there could be plenty of civilian uses too. Among the possibilities: T-shirts with moving images, home entertainment screens that morph into wallpaper or works of art when not in use, and displays in motor vehicle windshields.

Following up on the one-inch displays, the center has started producing its first four-inch diagonal displays, with production expected to ramp up in the next month, Raupp said. Eventually a sixto seven-inch screen will be needed for military use, he said.

The center hopes to deliver the first displays in about a year to General Dynamics C4 Systems division in Scottsdale, which will incorporate them into warfighter equipment it is developing.

The work is strictly cutting edge. Much of the technology being developed at the center is not available anywhere else in the world, Raupp said.

To produce the displays, the center is manufacturing thin film transistors that go behind each dot, or pixel, making up the display. The microscopic transistors serve as a switch, telling the pixels to be light or dark. An array of 80,000 pixels lined up in rows and columns creates an image the user sees in a manner similar to a conventional television or computer screen.

The center’s engineers also are experimenting with flexible materials such as thin stainless steel and plastic sheets to serve as the back plane, or substrate, on which the transistors and pixels are placed. Stainless steel has the advantage of being rugged, but it’s not as flexible as clear plastic, Raupp said.

Although the technology is not yet proven, it is promising, said Richard Coupland, senior program manager for the General Dynamics Future Force Warrior program.

Soldiers already have information available to them through handheld computers, but the flexible displays would provide savings in weight and power, “which in the field is a tremendous advantage,” he said.

General Dynamics hopes to test the technology in the field in 2007, but the timing for deploying it in actual military operations has not been determined, he said.