This introductory article reviews the topics covered in this issue of MRS Bulletin on advanced flat-panel displays and materials. The common requirements of flat-panel displays are compact dimensions, low power consumption, light weight, and high performance. Flat-panel displays are incorporated in many consumer products as well as in a large range of industrial, medical, military, transportation-related, and scientific instruments. In recent years, there have been dramatic improvements in flat-panel display technology due to an enhanced understanding of various new or existing materials as well as fabrication processes. “Flat-panel display” is a general term that includes many different types of technologies. It includes panels that are in mass production, such as passive or active addressed liquid-crystal displays or plasma displays, and those in the early production or development stages, such as organic light-emitting devices or electrophoretic displays. It also includes novel products that are based on the principle of flat-panel display technology, such as solid-state x-ray imagers. The articles in this issue cover a range of these topics.

The elimination of conventional peripheral LSI (large-scale integration) drivers is considered essential to the development of future low-cost, energy-efficient, lightweight, and thin displays. System-on-glass (SOG) displays are a type of display with various functional circuits integrated on a glass substrate. Low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) thin-film transistors (TFTs) make the integration of circuits possible because they can be assembled into complex, high-current driver circuits. Furthermore, LTPS TFTs are attracting attention for driving organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs). This article introduces present and future LTPS TFT technologies for SOG displays.

Organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs) have attracted considerable interest in the last five years and are now viewed as an important competitor with liquid crystals for a wide variety of display applications. Current research focuses on the use of small-molecule and polymer materials to make organic electroluminescent displays with both passive-and active-matrix technologies. This article will discuss work on the device architecture for a polymer passive-matrix display application, the stability of polymer light-emitting displays, and the use of ink-jet printing for high-resolution patterning of red, green, and blue light-emitting polymers.