1/8/2007 7:46:32 AM, by Nate Anderson
UK-based Plastic Logic has just secured $100 million in financing to build the world's first large-scale factory for the production of flexible electronic paper parts. Unlike the technology used in Sony's recent Reader device, Plastic Logic's semiconducting polymer backplanes are nearly as flexible as real paper, and they're not even "three to five years out"—Plastic Logic will have the factory operational in 2008.
The company builds "backplanes" which contain the circuits that drive electronic paper displays. To actually produce the paper, the backplane must be married to a frontplane made with LCD, OLED, or E Ink (used in the Sony Reader) technology. (E Ink is preferred because it holds its state without additional power and has reflectivity similar to dead-tree paper.)
Frontplanes have always been quite flexible, but Plastic Logic's key innovation was making the backplanes flex like a plastic binder cover. The backplane is an active-matrix, thin film transistor (TFT) display, and Plastic Logic has developed a production method that allows it to "print" the displays by depositing them from a solution. The company claims that this allows it to create the displays at low temperatures and to avoid the "mask alignment" issues that can complicate traditional photolithography.
The current prototype line that creates the displays is modest, pumping out only ten displays a day (and that's using two full shifts). The full-scale factory, located in Dresden, Germany, should produce more than a million modules each year.
The technology is intriguing, but so is the firm. Plastic Logic was spun out of Cambridge University's research labs back in 2000 and now has more than 60 employees. It's one of the successful (though no longer uncommon) results of the recent push by universities to monetize their R&D work, and the company has secured more than 50 patents that should give it a competitive edge in the future. Financial backers certainly think so; the company's new finance package is reportedly one of the largest venture capital rounds in European history. Investors are multinational, including firms from the US (Bank of America and Intel Capital), Hong Kong (Morningside), Germany (Siemens), Japan (Yasuda), and more.
Hermann Hauser, who heads one of the firms helping Plastic Logic with financing, sees the company as an important innovator in the semiconductor field because it's helping to lead the charge away from silicon-based products. "Having backed Plastic Logic from day one, I am delighted that the first full commercialization of plastic electronics is now firmly in our sights," he said in a statement. "With this investment we are not only scaling up a great company—we are also creating a new electronics industry that will become a significant addition to silicon."
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070108-8567.html
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