New Aalto technology will soon allow mobile phones to be rolled up

Mobile phone manufacturers have previously presented mobile phones whose display can be controlled by bending it. In these designs, the phone will only bend slightly on the edges, however.

With the production technology developed in Aalto University and Nagoya University in Japan, a phone could become flexible enough to be wrapped around the wrist or folded like a sheet of paper. "The production technology we have developed enables manufacturing such bendy touch screens on phones that you could even roll a phone up," says Esko I. Kauppinen, Professor of Applied Physics in Aalto University.

The new manufacturing technology resembles printing, and it is both inexpensive and fast. It also enables producing improved quality in electronics. A high-performance phone screen will reproduce video in good quality, for example.

Flexible electronics produced from carbon

Kauppinen explains that flexible electronics requires flexible production materials and technologies that allow easy and inexpensive production of electronics components. Such components include transistors and plastic substrates. When transistors and substrates bend, a mobile phone can also bend.

"Traditionally, electronics manufacture has made use of, e.g. silicon, which is an inflexible material. On a phone screen, silicon can be replaced with carbon nanotubes," which are flexible and tubular structures formed by carbon atoms. The method developed in Aalto University and Nagoya University allows transferring carbon nanotubes onto a plastic substrate surface. This way, it is possible to use carbon nanotubes to manufacture flexible, high-performance thin-film transistors on plastic substrates in a matter of seconds.