Flexible FPDs made of plastic are one of the display industry's next big things. Compared with their ultrathin-glass counterparts, however, plastic substrates allow water vapor and oxygen to penetrate at a much greater rate. The resulting damage to integral display materials may make the flexible substrates unreliable and a potential might-have-been.

To tackle this problem, the U.S. Display Consortium (USDC) has teamed with General Atomics of San Diego to develop the hardware and processes for measuring the permeation rates of water vapor through the plastic base layers. The $439,000 project uses a radioisotope such as tritium as a tracer material to "provide detection capability far surpassing that which is currently available," says Bob Pinnel, the consortium's CTO.