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Cambridge University's Graphene Centre (CGC) and Plastic Logic have signed a research collaboration agreement on graphene in flexible plastic electronics. Plastic Logic donated large scale deposition equipment to the CGC to support graphene development.

The co-research currently has three main activities: to develop graphene as a transparent, highly conductive layer for plastic backplanes for unbreakable LCD and flexible OLED displays, to develop new transistor structures that use graphene-like materials as the active layer and to exploit the commercialization of graphene for flexible electronics.

Researchers from MIT are developing a new solar cell made from graphene and molybdenum disulfide. They hope to achieve the "ultimate power conversion possible", and these new panels will be thin, light and efficient - in fact the researchers claim that for the same weight, the new panels will be up to a 1,000 times more efficient than silicon based panels.

A solar cell made from a single graphene sheet and a single molybdenum disulfide sheet will achieve about 1% to 2% efficiency. Silicon based cells achieve 15%-20%, but the researchers believe that stacking several layers together will boost the efficiency dramatically. The two layers together are just 1 nm thick, while silicon cells are hundreds of thousands times thicker.

In a rather puzzling report, Shanghai based Powerbooster Technology say they developed a graphene-based flexible touch-panels for mobile devices, and they have already began production. In fact they claim that they sell around 2 million touch panels per month, apparently to mid-sized Chinese smartphone makers.

Powerbooster aims to get the first products with their graphene touch screens in the market by the end of 2013, and they plan to invest $150 million in the next 3 years. Powerbooster is partnering with Bluestone Global Tech who supply them with graphene.

Researhcers from the Politecnico di Milano and the University of Illinois developed a Gigahertz graphene ring oscillator (1.28 GHz). They say that this oscillator appears to be less sensitive to fluctuations in the supply voltage compared to both conventional silicon CMOS and oscillators made from CNTs. Not to mention it is much faster (the best carbon nanotube ring oscillator made to date operates at just 50 MHz).

The researchers say that graphene based amplifiers and mixers have already been demonstrated, and now their graphene based oscillators marks the final major analog electronics building block enabled by graphene.

Korean Researchers managed to embed a LED inside a regular soft contact lens, using transparent and conductive electrodes made from graphene and silver nanowires. This is the first time an electronic device was embedded inside a contact lens using flexible and transparent materials.

The researchers final goal is to develop wearable computer displays inside contact lenses. Basically it will be like a Google Glass HMD, but without any external display components. Obviously that goal is still far in the future: currently they manged to embed just one LED and not a full display.

Researchers from the University of Manchester managed to create elementary magnetic moments in graphene and then switch them on and off. This is the first time magnetism itself has been toggled, rather than the magnetization direction being reversed. This may prove to be a major breakthrough on the way towards graphene based Spintronics transistor-like devices.