there's more and more an electronics that soldiers use and everything
requires an information terminal so the soldier can see what the thing is
doing or what it's trying to tell them. And displays. In 2004 meant an LCD
which is a big piece of glass. It's heavy if you don't want it to break.
The U. S. Army was looking for ways to improve the communication hardware
soldiers were used to carrying around when interacting with other units
out in the field. The army had an interest in flexible displays, not
because it wanted displays that you can bend but because it wanted
displays that are very light that don't break and that use very little
power. The army turned to research institutions in hopes that one could
help develop the kind of flexible displays they were looking for. So
really when you boil it all down. The key innovation here at S. U. Has
been figuring out how to take a piece of plastic, glue it onto something
thin flat and hard and stick it into equipment that's used to processing
glass and put thin film electronics onto that plastic. The army planned to
invest $100 million over 10 years. 100 proposals were put on the table and
Arizona State University came out on top issues flexible display center
was established back in february 2004. 1 of the key assets that S. You had
was this Motorola facility. This is this is one of the last flat panel
display manufacturing facilities built in north America Nick culinary is a
center. Director flexible displays. Use plastic instead of glass to
produce images. The idea was to do it in a way that would not completely
tip the apple card over. We wanted to still be able to use the
manufacturing infrastructure that's out there and we've been able to do
that and for the last eight years or so, we've been using it to make
displays with two different technologies. So the first kind of display, as
I said, that we worked on was was these e ink displays. So this is a
roughly six inch diagonal one. This is the same thing that you would see
in a Kindle, accepting a Kindle. It's made out of glass and here it's made
out of plastic. So instead of being that thick, it can be that thick. Nick
says prototypes are currently being tested in field trials. It's just a
display that lives on a sleeve, It's just part of the uniform. It's got
some map information on it. And the idea is that you don't even know it's
there most of the time, but now something bad starts to happen and you
need to know where am I where the rest of the good guys. We're the bad
guys which way's out. It's a lot thinner, it's a lot thinner and and as I
said, it bends. But again, the bending was kind of an added bonus feature
if you will, what we were really after was doesn't break Greg drop the
first flexible display center director who now heads up macro technology
works, says the center did something that a lot of people didn't think a
university could do. Usually university would kind of stop at what we call
proof of concept. Let's show that it works. Let's do it in the lab and now
let's write our patents. Let's write our papers and pass it off to someone
else. We're about taking it across the valley, that not all the way to
commercialization, but through pipeline manufactured at the point where
you can show that it can be manufactured if a manufacturer wants to go
ahead and take it further now, called flexible electronics and display
center, the future is looking brighter as more applications are in the
works. And so we've got the army, other government agencies, the
University and Industrial partners, all all looking at some of these
applications and thinking about, okay, how do we take advantage of what
we've achieved so far and moved to the nextlevel