"The basic technology of roll-to-roll can bring the price down and make plastic an excellent option for the back half of the display," says Frank Jeffrey, cofounder and CEO of PowerFilm and former 3M research physicist.

Modern displays tend to rely on transistors made of polysilicon, a semiconductor that allows electrons to move fast enough for video. The problem with polysilicon is that it needs to be deposited at high temperatures that melt plastic. 

Phicot turned to amorphous silicon,  deposited at low temperatures and yet is still fast enough to control the pixels of electrophoretic displays such as E-Ink, and eventually those in an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display.

At Phicot's facility, layers of amorphous silicon and insulating materials are deposited onto plastic. These rolls of plastic are then sent to a facility at HP Labs, where engineers use a novel kind of lithography,  self-aligned imprint lithography (SAIL), to etch transistors (left) onto the plastic's surface.

Once the transistors have been deposited, the screen itself must be added. HP has tested its transistors using E-Ink and with its own reflective display technology, capable of showing color and video.

According to Carl Taussig,(right)  director of HP's information surfaces labs, the amorphous silicon transistors could, with slight changes to their chemical makeup, also drive OLEDs.

Phicot isn't the only company trying to make plastic-based displays, as the recent rash of e-books and tables proves. Polymer Vision, (below left) a spin-off of Philips, and Plastic Logic (below right) are both promising products in the near future.

However, these devices rely on transistors made of organic materials, are easy to deposit on plastic at low temperatures, but  slowler operating than those made of amorphous silicon.

While organic transistors are good enough to power electrophoretic displays, they are incompatible with OLEDs. Another company, Kovio, is aiming to print silicon on plastic using technology that resembles an ink-jet printer; the main applications at this point are RFID tags.

Overlooked has been Portuguese company Displax, which has now declared its development and mid 2010 shipping of a “skin” that can turn virtually any surface into a multi-touch display.

Based on capacitive technology, the “skin” is developed on a thinner-than-paper polymer film that turns a surface, be it glass, plastic or wood, curved or flat, into an interactive touch screen display.

The technology works by a grid of nanowires placed throughout the film recognising touch screen interactivity. These input signals are then passed to a microprocessor controller that analyses the data and determines the exact location where the contact took place.

The hypersensitive lightweight “skin” features air movement detection as well as touch sensitivity, so will, for what is thought to be the first time, react to a user blowing on it, registering both the intensity and direction of the air flow.

So far the “skin” has a size dimension ranging from anywhere between 7"  and 3 meters diagonally, with a transparency rate of 98%, showing the surface beneath. At present a 50" display is able to detect up to sixteen fingers simultaneously.

While Displax initially began developing the multi-touch technology for use by manufacturers of LCD screens, working on such project Optimus Concept Store and an Inter Ikea Centre Group, the future potential uses are many and varied.

Audio visual integration through projection displays and enhanced gaming possibilities (three single hands at once!) the ability to cover bigger areas could see this 'skin' used in a host of commercial environments, in and out of doors.