The first electronic paper factory opened

The young company Plastic Logic last Wednesday opened the world's first factory for the production of electronic paper production - “ink” high-resolution displays made on flexible polymer semiconductors . Electronic ink technology was licensed from E Ink, and the company's product was developed 10 years ago by its two co-founders Richard Friend and Genning Shiringaus (Henning Sirringhaus), who at that time investigated polymers at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.

The plant, which from January 2009 will begin producing displays in volumes of about 11 million pieces per year, is equipped with original equipment operating in fully automatic mode. Conductors and transistors made of flexible materials are applied to a plastic substrate with an industrial equivalent of an inkjet printer, spraying them through micro nozzles according to a given program at room temperature. This technology is cheaper and works much faster than printing displays on electronic inks on a glass substrate with traditional lithography. And the resulting board can be bent even in half, while maintaining performance.

At the September DEMOfall conference in San Diego, Plastic Logic showed a prototype of an electronic document reading device based on a new display. With a thickness of no more than a glossy magazine, the gadget has an A4 touchscreen. The display is enclosed in a rigid frame, but its flexible properties make the device practically unbreakable and very light - only 370 g.

Plastic Logic is aiming at a free niche of e-readers for business. Her gadget allows you to make notes in documents with stickers and markers, thus simulating the paper, which is still familiar to most.
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The closest analogue of the device can be called Readius from Polymer Vision, in which a small display is made on its own "flexible" technology.