Plastic Logic, E Ink, team for large area flexible display

CAMBRIDGE, England — Plastic Logic Ltd. and E Ink Corp. have reached a nonexclusive agreement to cooperate on the design and fabrication of flexible all-plastic electronic displays, Plastic Logic said Monday (Dec. 6).

E Ink (Cambridge, Mass.) develops electronic paper display technology. Plastic Logic develops printed, flexible thin film transistor (TFT) arrays. The two companies expect to combine their technologies to produce high-resolution active-matrix displays suitable for a range of applications from smart cards and cellphones to wireless electronic readers such as e-books, e-maps and e-newspapers.

"Advances in device architectures, direct-write processing and solution processable materials have brought the high-volume manufacture of flexible displays at consumer price-points within grasp," said Stuart Evans, CEO of Plastic Logic, in a statement.

"This now allows us to jointly demonstrate a paper-like electronic display with outstanding resolution, brightness and contrast that can be produced economically to enable wide adoption," said Russ Wilcox, CEO of E Ink, in the same statement.

The combination of imaging film from E Ink and backplanes fabricated using Plastic Logic's process would enable displays of up to 100 dots per inch resolution in 2005 and 150 dpi in 2006 with areas up to A5 in 2005 and A4 in 2006. The technology would allow 2-bit, four level greycale and due to its bistability low power consumption, Plastic Logic said.

The smallest radius of curvature for such displays would be less than 2 cm. Plastic Logic's manufacturing process enables active matrix backplanes to be 'printed' using additive solution-processing and direct-write techniques.

Engineers and scientists from Plastic Logic and E Ink have coauthored a paper entitled 'Printing of polymer transistors for flexible active matrix displays' that is due to given by Henning Sirringhaus, chief scientist at Plastic Logic, at the International Displays Workshop, Niigata, Japan on Dec. 10.