Plastic Logic

Cambridge University’s Cavendish Labs and I’m joined by Professor Henning Sirringhaus, who is a founder and chief scientists for a company called Plastic Logic

Plastic Logic is a little start-up company in Cambridge that make plastic electronics. So if you imagine your plastic bag that you use to do your shopping that’s a very uninteresting thing. It doesn’t do much. But you can make electronic devices such as transistors, light emitting diodes, solar cells using these plastic materials in the same way that you would use silicon for conventional electronics. Plastic Logic is a company that’s exploiting this materials research for displays.

The core of the technology is to make plastic transistors using a plastic semiconductor. So what you need for a flexible display are lots of transistors on a flexible substrate. Plastic Logic uses PET, which is the material from which coke bottle are made as a substrate. It then deposits an array of transistors onto that substrate.

It can be up to a million transistors. You then put that together with a display medium which consists of solid capsules that are filled with a liquid. Inside the liquid are coloured particles: some are white, some are black. The white ones are negatively charged and the black ones are positively charged.

So when you apply a voltage the white ones might go to the top or the black ones might go to the top. Whether you get white or black is determined by the signal that the transistor beneath applies to the display medium. This is how you build up an image. Then you can make this flexible display

plastic logic


Same technology is used in Amazon Kindle

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