Several obstacles crowd the way to make electronic devices that are completely flexible. One of the hurdles in making distinctly inflexible and fragile electronic components bend and still function. Work on flexible screens and printed electronics is progressing and the University of Tokyo looks to have made a significant breakthrough in the area of flexible memory. The team has managed to create flash memory that is both organic and flexible. It acts just like standard flash memory, but is manufactured from organic materials. In its current form there is a major limitation, however, as the memory retention is limited to one day. Apparently this is easy to fix though, as is the maximum 1,000 read and writes it can currently handle. This organic flash memory is stable in air and requires just 6V for erasing and 1V for writing. In terms of flexibility the polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) resin sheet the memory sits on is capable of a 6 mm curvature radius without causing problems. Components that turn into flexible sheets will lead to devices formed on a single film sheet or placed on top of each other in multiple sheets – seeing the development of extremely thin devices that can be flexed or even rolled up completely at a very low cost and on a large scale. Such flexible developments will have major design implications on the electronic equipments that we use.
18-Dec-09 
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