Plastic Logic makes backplanes for e-paper.Plastic LogicPosted on 04/01/2009 9:43:44 PM PDT by neverdem
Second-generation e-paper can be rolled up, use almost no power and even display video.
Plastic Logic makes backplanes for e-paper.Plastic LogicE-readers such as the Amazon Kindle and Sony Readers have brought e-paper to the masses. With bright screens, contrast and resolution that rivals that of ink on paper and a reflective display that can be read even in bright sunlight, the devices make reading much more comfortable than on a computer screen.
But with small, rigid, black-and-white glass screens, these first-generation devices are just the starting point for a new industry. A swarm of companies, including big names such as Hitachi, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard, is racing to develop bigger e-paper devices that are flexible and can display colour and video.
The future will depend on advances in the technologies used to make the electronic ink films, as well as on how flexible researchers can make the dense circuitry used to power the e-ink pixels. The make-or-break is likely to be which combinations of technology can be mass-produced cheaply so that they will accessible to people in fields such as education (see 'The textbook of the future') .
Most current e-readers use electrophoretic ink technology produced by E Ink, a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The research behind the technique was first published in Nature in 19981, but it has taken a decade and more than a hundred million dollars to take it from the lab to the factory.
The technology uses tiny capsules 0.1 millimetres wide that are filled with a non-conducting fluid that contains particles of positively charged white and negatively charged black pigments. Applying a positive charge causes the black particles to move to the top of the capsule and the white ones to the bottom, so that the surface appears black. A negative charge switches the surface back to white.
An added plus is that once the particles have migrated, they stay in place, so no electricity is needed to maintain the image — only to change it, such as when turning a page. Combined with the lack of an energy-devouring backlight, e-paper is much easier on batteries than devices such that use typical liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), such as desktop computers and laptops.
To make sheets of e-paper, a thin-film of the capsules is then applied to a board that contains the circuitry needed to give the pixel pattern. One of the leaders in making these circuit boards, which are called backplanes, is Plastic Logic, a spin-off from the University of Cambridge, UK. The firm plans to start shipping an all-plastic flexible reader later this year, ramping up to mass commercial production in early 2010. Its first flexible device, which uses a backplane of organic thin-film transistors, and E Ink's e-paper, displays in black and white, but is magazine-size and weighs just 450 grams. The firm expects to begin marketing colour versions in around three years.
Producing such flexible e-paper displays cheaply is an issue that is being addressed by the US army. In February the Flexible Display Center, which the army runs with Arizona State University in Tempe, demonstrated a flexible touch-screen display — again using e-paper from E Ink. The big novelty, it claims, is that it has mastered producing the displays using a reel-to-reel printing process similar to that used by newspaper presses.
That could be a very big deal, as many believe this sort of continuous production will be key to bringing down the costs of e-paper. But such scaling-up is notoriously difficult.
While some companies work to refine backplanes, others are trying to improve on the inks themselves — to get better colours, and to improve on the slow refresh rates of e-papers — typically hundreds of milliseconds. This speed is fine for turning a book page, but far from the millisecond rates needed to display video, or to do word processing.
The first commercial colour e-reader appeared in March, Fujitsu's FLEPia reader. Rather than using e-ink, the device is based on the company's cholesteric LCD technology, which like e-ink, doesn't need power to maintain text or images. Many other e-reader companies have colour e-ink prototypes on show, but they all fall short of the quality that consumers and advertisers are used to.
A promising technology for improving colour displays is electrowetting, which has produced the brightest of all e-paper displays and seems to be the only e-paper technology with refresh rates that are fast enough to display video. The technology is being developed by Liquavista in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, a company spun-off in 2006 from Philips Research Labs.
Rather than exploiting electrophoresis, electrowetting uses small droplets of oily, coloured inks held in tiny capsules against an transparent hydrophobic layer on a reflective white background. When no current is flowing, the droplets spread out to mask the white background and give a colour to the pixel. Switch the current on and the droplets coalesce into a bead, letting light through to the white reflective layer and making the pixel seem white. Although some current is needed to maintain the image, the switching takes just milliseconds — fast enough to produce sharp video images. It hopes to roll out its technology by the end of the year.
Whatever technologies prevail, magazine-sized monochrome displays will hit the shelves this year, followed by colour versions in 2-5 years, with video coming after that. By then, e-paper displays will likely be everywhere, creating a multi-billion-dollar market from magazines and newspapers to advertising billboards. And that is likely to be just the start of a revolution in new media (see 'Clicking on a new chapter').
*sigh*
the only pic available is a side shot of what could be a normal magazine.
a youtube clip of it in action would go a long way
the only pic available is a side shot of what could be a normal magazine.
a youtube clip of it in action would go a long way
Woe is me! Why don't you do a search on Plastic Logic?
Single Gene Shapes the Toil of Ants’ Fighter and Forager Castes
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Thank you!
thank you Marie!
my comment was more about the article and how it didn’t have more pics/video
looking at it, the only thing i wonder is why is the border and inch+ wide all around?
I don’t know, but I want one! (I wonder if they have a zoom and scroll feature??)
E-readers such as the Amazon Kindle and Sony Readers have brought e-paper to the masses. With bright screens, contrast and resolution that rivals that of ink on paper and a reflective display that can be read even in bright sunlight, the devices make reading much more comfortable than on a computer screen. But with small, rigid, black-and-white glass screens, these first-generation devices are just the starting point for a new industry. A swarm of companies, including big names such as Hitachi, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard, is racing to develop bigger e-paper devices that are flexible and can display colour and video.
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