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Plastic semiconductor ‘ready for commercialisation’; Dresden production facility to start up 2008 |
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Jan 05, 2007 at 03:13 PM |
 Cambridge University spin-off Plastic Logic plans to build the first factory to manufacture plastic electronics on a commercial scale. The company has closed a first round of funding of $100 million to back the commercialisation move.
The facility in Dresden, Germany, will produce flexible active-matrix
display modules for ‘take anywhere, read anywhere' electronic reader
products. It will use Plastic Logic's proprietary process to fabricate
active-matrix displays that are thin, light and robust, enabling a
reading experience closer to paper than any other technology, the
company says.
The facility will produce display modules for portable electronic reader devices. It will have an initial capacity of more than a million display modules per year and production will start in 2008, employing 140 people. Dresden in the ‘Silicon Saxony' region of eastern Germany has been chosen as the facility location following a worldwide selection process. The site will include a Class 100 cleanroom with a floor area of 3500m2. Although Plastic Logic has also developed other applications for its technology, including flexible displays and sensors, the Dresden facility will focus on producing display modules.
By 2008, the company plans to produce A5 displays with a 16 greyscale at a resolution of 150 pixels per inch (ppi). Other milestones include a 4096 colour A5 display (100ppi, 200dpi), due in 2010, and for 2012 A5 video capability. Smaller displays with higher resolution (300ppi) have been demonstrated. The displays are flexible to a 5mm radius of curvature. Standard line pitches are 5-10µm, capable of delivering displays of 200ppi, the company believes. Development to reduce the pitch to as low as 60nm are in the pipeline.
Plastic Logic claims that its unique approach solves critical issues in manufacturing high resolution transistor arrays on flexible plastic substrates by using a low temperature process without mask alignment that is scaleable for large area, high volume and low cost. The aim is to produce devices on flexible, low-cost substrates such as polyethyleneterephthalate (PET). The company already operates a 350×350mm prototype line. Although PET is used to produce drink bottles, Plastic Logic has worked with DuPont-Teijin Films to produce high quality PET substrates for its work.
The electronic devices use thin film transistors (TFTs) constructed from semiconducting polymer materials. These materials can be deposited from a solution allowing the devices to be printed (direct-write, i.e. no lithography steps), reducing processing costs. The processing has to be carried out at low temperatures so as not to degrade the polymer materials involved. Up to now TFTs have been fabricated with amorphous silicon deposited at higher temperature on a rigid glass substrate. The amorphous silicon process also needs lengthy lithographic processing steps. When asked about how the Plastic Logic processes work, the company would only say ‘proprietary'.
What Plastic Logic has developed is the display control ‘backplane'. This backplane can then be combined with many display frontplane technologies such as liquid crystal display (LCD), organic light emitting diode (OLED) or electrophoretic ‘electronic paper' to make a display. (Electrophoresis uses electric fields to move suspended particles to create images. E Ink develops such a display technology that is used by the Sony Reader and the iRex Illiad.) The completed displays will most likely be made by other electronics companies, with Plastic Logic providing the crucial control circuitry and possibly licensing its designs.
Plastic logic estimates that an electronic reader built around a display module based on its technology could have up to three times the screen area for the equivalent weight of a typical 6" electronic reader product available today (i.e. approximately 250g). This is enabled both by weight reduction in the display module and in the casing which no longer has to be engineered to be rigid to protect the glass backplane.
John Mills, Chief Operating Officer at Plastic Logic. "Wireless connectivity will allow you to purchase and download a book or pick up the latest edition of your newspaper wherever you are and whenever you need it. The battery will last for thousands of pages so you can leave your charger at home."
The company was asked about the power consumption comparison with amorphous silicon-based TFT backplanes, but the ‘colleague' who was assigned the question had not responded at the time of writing.
"Even in this age of pervasive digital content, our research shows that consumers are very reluctant to read on laptops, phones and PDAs," said Simon Jones, Vice President of Product Development at Plastic Logic. "We still carry around enormous amounts of paper. However, people are making less room in their lives for the weight and bulk of paper and are becoming more sensitive to the environmental impact of printing to read."
Plastic Logic was spun out of Cambridge University in 2000 to build on 10 years of research and has a team of more than 60 employees. The new funding effort has been led by Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Investment Corporation. Existing backers include Amadeus (the leader of the company's seed money), Intel Capital, Bank of America, BASF Venture Capital, Quest for Growth and Merifin Capital.
IDTechEx forecasts that plastic electronics will be a $30 billion industry by 2015, and could reach as much as $250 billion by 2025. Another market analyst firm, NanoMarkets, estimates the 2012 market at $19.7 billion (see http://www.fabtech.org/content/view/2295/74/ and http://www.fabtech.org/content/view/2298/74/).
By Dr Mike Cooke
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