CAMBRIDGE, UK -- Plastic Logic, the leader in the development and industrialization of flexible organic electronics, and ISORG, the pioneer in organic photodetectors and large area image sensors in printed electronics, picked up the coveted award for their revolutionary large area flexible image sensor. The demonstration, at the FlexTech Conference in Phoenix, AZ, gave a glimpse of the huge range of possible applications which flexible large area sensor technology can enable. The overall market for printed and flexible sensors is forecast to be worth over $7 billion by 2020 (IDTechEx 2014).

The collaboration is based on the deposition of organic printed photodetectors (OPD), pioneered by ISORG, onto a plastic organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) backplane, developed by Plastic Logic, to create a flexible sensor with a 4x4 cm active area, 375um pitch (175um pixel size with 200um spacing) and 94 x 95 = 8930 pixel resolution. As much as for the technical achievement, this award recognizes the far-reaching potential of the underlying technology in an exciting range of applications and the very real competitive advantages of such products.

The backplane design, production process and materials were optimized for the application by Plastic Logic to meet ISORG's requirements. The result, a flexible, transmissive backplane, represents a significant breakthrough in the manufacture of new large area image sensors and demonstrates the potential use of Plastic Logic's unique flexible transistor technology beyond plastic displays. Combined with ISORG's unique organic photodetector technology, it allows the creation of conformable, large area image sensors, which are thinner, lighter, flexible and more robust than traditional approaches.

The combination of these two disruptive technologies opens up possibilities for a range of new applications, based around digital image sensing, including smart packaging and sensors for medical equipment and biomedical diagnostics, security and mobile commerce -user identification by fingerprint scanning, environmental and other industrial uses. Most exciting of all is the ability to enable scanning surfaces and novel 3D interactive gesture based user interfaces for consumer electronics, including printers, smartphones and tablets.

The CEOs of Plastic Logic and ISORG agree there is great potential in combining two disruptive technologies and plan to bring new applications to market. It underlines the real impact of plastic electronics as it starts to go mainstream in consumer markets.