We’ll offer you a crash course in foldable displays and the exciting tech that makes them possible, whether you’ve always been fascinated about how they operate or haven’t given it much thought.
The Basics of Folding Screens
Whether rigid or flexible, flat or curved, rollable or folding, all displays operate similarly. Simply put, the images we see on television are made up of millions of tiny colour specks. There are several methods for accomplishing this, resulting in the various displays you see today, such as LCD, OLED, and, more recently, micro-LED and mini-LED. The substrate is a layer of a substance that holds all of the colour dots. For many years, the substrate has been a thin sheet of glass – rigid, fragile glass that can only stretch so much before shattering. Then, over the last 10 years, display producers developed flexible plastic display panels that can twist without breaking.
How Does it Work?
To understand how they work it’s good to think of foldable OLED panels as a very thin (and probably not very tasty) layer cake. Each layer of this hi-tech cake has a distinct purpose. These layers are fused in a fraction of a millimetre-thick container. Let’s have a look at them.
The substrate layer: Often known as the board, is the basic foundation of the screen, supporting all the other layers. The substrate of a flexible display is constructed of plastic or, less typically, metal. Most flexible screen technologies currently employ a polymer material called polyimide as a substrate (PI). Polyimide has high mechanical strength and thermal properties and is flexible and insulating. The TFT (thin-film transistor) layer: It is applied on top of the flexible substrate and controls power delivery to each pixel. Consider it a “power grid” that connects all of the display’s pixels. Unlike LCD screens, OLED screens can adjust each pixel separately, allowing higher contrast rates and lower power consumption. OLED layer: The light-emitting layer, which is made up of individual pixels with red, green, and blue subpixels in each. By adjusting the amount of electricity received by its subpixels, each pixel can achieve a specific hue and luminosity. Pixels are then combined to generate the image we see on the screen. Cover layer: This layer, also known as the encapsulating layer, covers and shields the other layers. It’s also the layer that users interact with while using folding screens. In terms of materials, polyimide (the same as the substrate) is the cheapest option, but ultra-thin glass has recently become popular (UTG). UTG is more durable than plastic and feels more like ordinary glass, but it can still flex. Samsung has been implementing UTG on its latest Z Flip and Z Fold devices.
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