Bill Liu, cofounder and CEO of Royole, which has designed and is starting to mass produce a super-thin flexible display.
- Flexible displays have long been a dream of futurists.
- Such screens have been commercially available for about five years now, but few devices really show off their bendable property.
- That may be about to change, thanks in part to Royole, a startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
- Founded by a Stanford PhD graduate, Royole has designed and is starting to mass-produce a super-thin flexible screen that could be used in everything from t-shirts to portable speakers.
- Its new screen technology is coming on the market just in advance of the expected debut of the first foldable phones that will be built around similar technology.
It's the stuff of science fiction, and plenty of tech trade shows - a screen so thin and flexible that it can be rolled up into a cylinder as small as a cigarette or hung on a wall like wallpaper.
Many believe those properties could spark a revolution in gadget design. And that revolution may finally be at hand.
If it is, you might thank Bill Liu.
Liu is the chairman and founder of Royole, which specializes in making flexible displays and sensors.
The company, which is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has come up with a way to make a full-color, high-resolution screen that is just 0.01 millimeters thick - thinner than a sheet of standard copy paper.
Royole just opened a new factory in China that will mass produce the displays and is already working with partners to get them installed in everything from t-shirts to automobiles to smartphones.
And its screens, thanks to their flexibility, could soon be used it lots of ways and places that other displays just can't.
"You can see this will change a lot of different industries," Liu said in a recent interview with Business Insider. He continued: "This is not a concept. This is not sci-fi."
This is not a concept. This is not sci-fi.
Royole's screens are based on OLED technology, in which the lighting elements are built into the display itself. Unlike the OLED screens that are in some higher-end televisions, which are typically placed on a rigid base like glass, the lighting elements in Royole's screens are placed on a flexible plastic base, so they can bend or roll up.
"The cool thing here is that we're not limited by the form factor of the surface," said Liu, who founded Royole with some friends from Stanford after graduating from there with a PhD in electrical engineering. "They could be anywhere."
Royole, which was founded in 2012 and has raised $1.1 billion in funding, just brought its new factory online in June. The plant will be able to produce up to 50 million panels a year once it's at full capacity, Liu said. That could help it feed a potentially burgeoning market for bendable gadgets.
Flexible screens and gadgets have been in development for decades
Flexible displays have been a long time coming.
Researchers have been trying to develop flexible screen technology since at least the early 1970s - first in the form of monochrome displays that were intended to replace printed pages, and then, much later, in the form of color ones that might replace the screens in TV or portable devices.
For much of the last decade, display makers including Samsung and LG have been showing off their flexible OLED screens and prototype of products made with them at trade shows.
Since 2013, you've actually been able to buy gadgets with flexible screens in them, but you likely didn't realize it.
Samsung's Galaxy Round, a relatively obscure smartphone that came out that year, was one of the first gadgets that used a flexible screen way back in 2013. Because the display was placed behind a fixed plate of glass, so you couldn't really tell that it was bendable. The only clue was that the front of the phone was concave.
Other smartphones since the Galaxy Round have also employed flexible displays, including the LG G Flex and the Edge versions of the Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy Note lines. More recently, the screens have started to make their way into even mainstream devices. Apple's iPhone X, for example, has a flexible display behind its famously notched screen.
But those devices are far from the rollable displays and foldable screens and wallpaper TVs that have long danced through the tech industry's dreams.
They were "a disappointing application of what that the technology could do," said Raymond Soneira, CEO of DisplayMate, a consulting firm for the display and TV industries.
Neither businesses nor consumers were ready for bendable or foldable gadgets when the first flexible displays started rolling off production lines five years ago, analysts said. Electronics makers generally hadn't set up their supply chains to accommodate them or figured out how they might be able to take advantage of the screens' properties in new products. Apps hadn't been written specifically for devices with bendable screens. And nobody had laid the groundwork for new kinds of flexible gadgets by marketing them to consumers.
"The tech was there but the world wasn't ready to use it," Soneira said.
Demand for bigger screens may pave the way for bendable gadgets
Things may be different now. Next year, Samsung will reportedly introduce a phone with a foldable screen that's built around its flexible display technology. Apple reportedly has a foldable phone in the works, too.
Those products are being driven by manufacturers trying to meet consumers' seemingly contradictory demands, Soneira said. Consumers have shown that they want mobile devices with ever-larger screens - but they still want them to be handheld gadgets. That's basically impossible to do with standard, rigid screens.
Liu shows off some devices that have Royole's screen built in, including a party hat, left, and a portable speaker, right.
The release of foldable screen phones and other gadgets from major manufacturers will likely spur developers to start making apps designed specifically around those features. It's also likely to inspire demand for other devices that take advantage of the properties of bendable screens.
Flexible screens will likely get their start by replacing other screens in devices we already recognize, including not just smartphones, but computer monitors and laptop computers, allowing manufacturers to make models that are slightly more innovative or resilient, said Ryan Martin, a principal analyst at ABI Research. But eventually, manufacturers are likely to get a lot more creative with them.
A flexible display "changes the realm of design as well as design thinking," Martin said. "You're no longer confined to the four corners of a screen. You can make things more abstract."
He continued: "Technology will fade into the background and adapt to us, rather than us adapt to it."
Royole thinks it can take on the electronics giants
At CES, the giant electronics trade show held in Las Vegas every January, LG has shown off a prototype for a car dashboard in which the speedometer, tachometer and other other gauges and buttons are displayed virtually on flexible screens that could be shaped to the contours of a car's interior.
In a meeting with Business Insider, Liu brought with him a small, portable, cylindrical speaker that had a screen wrapped around it and a New Year's party app with a screen curved around the front of its crown.
What's more, because it's using a different methodology for building its screens, it was able to get its factory up and running for about $1 billion, which is far less than what it would cost its competitors, he said.
"We built it from the ground up," he said. "This is all brand-new technology."
The first devices with Royole's screens should start showing up later this year. The company plans to sell T-shirts and hats with its flexible displays built in. Soon thereafter, it expects marketers to start using its screens to display advertisements in elevators, airports, shopping malls, and other places.
From there, the screens should start making its way into other products, both traditional and new, Liu said. When purchased in volume, they should be competitive in price to other types of displays, he said.
"This is the future," he said. "We finally see this as a mature technology for mass-production applications."