HP to replace glass displays with plastic
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 10 May 2010, 22:27 IST   |    2 Comments
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HP to replace glass displays with plastic
Bangalore: In its effort to figure out how to reduce the production cost of their laptops and other devices, HP has realized a solution that can reduce the cost of production. Plastic substrates and their manufacturing process are cheaper than the glass substrates currently using to make laptop display or monitor. The company makes 65 million devices every year that sport glass display. Displays represent around third of the cost of production. "In 10 years, glass will be as much a memory of displays as cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are today," said Carl Taussing, Head of HP Labs' Information Surfaces Lab. According to cnet reports, Taussig and his team are working on a process that uses superthin plastic 50 microns thick (half the thickness of a piece of paper). Because plastic is flexible, it can be put on spools and put into a machine that etches resistors, the electronics that help render an image onto a display, in a process that almost resembles the way a newspaper is printed, called 'roll to roll.' Manufacturing this flexible material for display on a roll is much faster and therefore cheaper than the current batch process, through which giant pieces of glass are moved by mammoth robotic arms in factories the size of some small cities. HP will use flexible displays with a project which is expected to start in 2011 for the U.S. military.

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