Researchers at the Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI) developed new ultra-thin OLED electrode material as an alternative to ITO that can achieve a curve radius of 0.1 mm. The new electrodes are made from silver nanowires and colorless polyimide, fused together.

The researchers say this electrode can survive being folded 100,000 times. It reaches 90% transmittance, with a sheet of 8 ohm/sq. Surface roughness is 0.8 nm, similar to regular smartphone glass substrates.

The researchers estimate that fully-foldable smartphones will arrive on the market within two years.

There were some reports in the past that Samsung aims to release the first foldable mobile phone towards the end of 2015, it’ll be interesting to see if they manage to hit that goal (Samsung’s current flexible OLED displays and prototypes all use ITO touch electrodes).

A 0.1 mm curvature radius is pretty impressive. SDC’s latest prototypes (shown in November 2014) had a radius of curvature of 5 mm, while the Galaxy Note Edge has a curvature of 7 mm. SDC goal is to reach a radius of 1 mm, and they aim to achieve that within two years.

<Sources: oled-info>