Sometimes products need a fanfare and sometimes… well, they’re just quietly great. Our new 7” SimplePlus touch display is in the second category. It’s superb ­– in the right hands. What do we mean by that? Well, on the face of it, it’s what might be called ‘mid-range’. A product that delivers the perfect balance between cost and performance, which is exactly what you need if you’re looking for affordability without cutting corners. You might call it the unsung hero of touch displays.

You see a curved touchscreen monitor. You might even be thinking how good it would look in your gaming rig.

We see the painstaking mechanical stress needed to form the curve and how to calculate the limits of that stress.

As often happens at Avnet, an acronym is the start of a journey to something pretty cool. Take PDLC, for example. It stands for ‘Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystals’, which, we must admit, isn’t the catchiest of descriptions. But when you engineer PDLC into glass (or even a self-adhesive film that can be affixed to glass) it becomes much more interesting.

We have it in front of our faces every day, but only pay it any attention if it breaks. A layer of transparent coverglass sits over all the display panels that we use every day – in smartphones and tablets, televisions and monitors – and is essential in guarding the delicate electronics underneath, while also enhancing the quality of the display.

Ultra thin and ultra light, with outstanding optical performance, Active Matrix OLED displays have been a staple technology for smartphones and smaller consumer applications since around 2009. Happily, these small, powerful displays have recently grown in size, opening up opportunities for their use beyond handheld applications.