Detectors & Imaging

Polyera launches E Ink-based truly flexible display

Aug. 18, 2015

Flexible electronics company Polyera has released the Wove Band, a flexible display smartwatch product.

Polyera has launched a non-silicon truly flexible display that conserves energy on static-image mode.

Flexible electronics company Polyera (San Francisco, CA) has released the Wove Band, a flexible display smartwatch product. The Wove Band features a flexible display that can either be flat or wrap around a wrist. Submissions for free developer units will open in September with the first units shipping in December to a select group of artists and developers. A commercial launch is planned for mid-2016, with additional details at http://www.wove.com. The Wove Band is made possible by Polyera Digital Fabric Technology and E Ink flexible electronic ink film.

Polyera Digital Fabric Technology is a unique set of materials, tools, and know-how designed to enable the production of flexible electronic products at scale. Polyera says the platform is the result of 10 years of development, spanning fundamental science, engineering, and design. Most attempts at making flexible displays have relied on traditional electronics materials, such as silicon, being deposited on plastic substrates. This approach allows the creation of products with fixed curved screens, but the brittleness of these electronics layers makes them unsuitable for products that are dynamically flexible such as the Wove Band.

Polyera Digital Fabric Technology, by contrast, uses proprietary electronic materials to enable displays that are flexible, robust, and can be manufactured in traditional display fabrication plants with minimal capital investment. The Polyera Digital Fabric Technology platform also addresses the integration of these displays into end products, by incorporating proprietary engineering and design solutions.

The Wove Band will feature a flexible, low-power touch display combining Polyera Digital Fabric Technology with E Ink's flexible and reflective electronic ink film. E Ink's film has been proven in production and used in millions of displays. The bi-stable nature of E Ink's electronic ink allows displays to consume no energy while holding a static image. The combination of Polyera's and E Ink's technologies enables the Wove Band to have a display which is both large and always-on, while consuming less power than smartwatches with far smaller displays.

Beyond the Wove Band, Polyera is actively working on a variety of flexible electronics components, such as flexible OLED displays, flexible sensors and flexible logic circuits, which will enable devices delivering unprecedented form factors and experiences.

SOURCE: Polyera; http://www.polyera.com

About the Author

Gail Overton | Senior Editor (2004-2020)

Gail has more than 30 years of engineering, marketing, product management, and editorial experience in the photonics and optical communications industry. Before joining the staff at Laser Focus World in 2004, she held many product management and product marketing roles in the fiber-optics industry, most notably at Hughes (El Segundo, CA), GTE Labs (Waltham, MA), Corning (Corning, NY), Photon Kinetics (Beaverton, OR), and Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA). During her marketing career, Gail published articles in WDM Solutions and Sensors magazine and traveled internationally to conduct product and sales training. Gail received her BS degree in physics, with an emphasis in optics, from San Diego State University in San Diego, CA in May 1986.