The Next Big Thing In the Market: e-Paper and e-books

How about going to a beach enjoying the sun and the breeze with a virtual paper that downloads news data, novels or even articles via wireless network, yet small 'n flexible enough to fit into one's pocket?
It is there already in the markets thanks due to some miraculous breakthroughs in digital vision technology! PVI technologies and others like Sony are out in the market with the first of its kind- 'e-paper' or electronic paper based on active matrix display technology utilizing electrophoretic crystals or organic polymers (OLED) that is paper thin and could be read just as a newspaper. The concept is based on flexible e-paper display that produces bi-stable images with paper-like 180' degree glare free readability.


Bi-stable, meaning a device that draws power only if the image is refreshed, as opposed to the backlighting facility employed in LCD panels. Handheld e-reading devices have metamorphosed and evolved rapidly in the last decade from the first PDA's to the current e-papers. Organic light emmitting diode crystals are used to create full feature motion videos, high graphics-enable images with good resolution even under sunlight. These cousins of PDAs are both light, durable, unbreakable enabling digitization of conventional books.

E-paper can be used to read pages just like any other book, but without turning pages, with with future battery capabilities, each could survive about 7000 pages of readebility per charge. The technology behind e-paper is quite interesting and dates back to 1960's when Xerox took the first initiative to develope innovative display devices.

Technology Behind E-Paper:

Usually, electronic paper has two parts-electronic ink as a 'first plane' and ICs used to create patterns of texts and images as a 'backplane'. The older theory worked on the concept of ‘electro capillarity’ that works by moving colored liquids against a white background. Later, the term was changed to 'Electro wetting' as a widely applied theme. Organic TFT technology is implicated in this new version. E-paper structurally consists of thin sheets of plastic beads encapsulated in pockets of oil that are able to rotate freely within the plastic sheet when electricity is passed between them. In-turn, each hemispheres of a bead (ball) have a different color and charge assigned to them. When electric fields are applied by the backplane, beads rotate creating a two-colored pattern. Aggregations of thousands of similar beads are used to create simple texts or images based on electrical fields applied.



The limitations of these bi-chromal frontplane were that it lacked colors. As a result, electrophorectic front plane were developed to display multi-color texts and images. Millions of microcapsules of 100 microns (diameter of human hair) each filled with clear fluid (+ve white, and -ve black)were placed on the front plane and electric fields applied. When -ve field is applied, +ve white particles moved up to the top of the microcapsules appearing as white dots, while black particles settling down to remain hidden from view. Again, when +ve field is applied, black particles migrate upward to the top while white particles move to the bottom thus generating black text or picture. This same technology was somewhat modified to include colored crystals as Cholesteric Liquid Crystals (ChLCD), some spiral shaped liquid crystal molecules that can change orientations from horizontal to vertical positions and vice versa to produce multicolored effects when electricity is applied.

E-paper has a wide potential aplications within various domains for example, someday, we would be delivered e-newspapers instead of the one we have now, or e-displays and hoards up on the sky, or just wearable display screens on the front-back of our trousers or so! The Financial opportunity is huge considering the easiness and wide acceptability within the consumers domain.Commpanies like PVI, Taiwan, Sony, IBM, Phillips, Toshiba and Fuzitshu has already jumped into the business of Electronic paper R&D and marketability.

Sources: http://www.tfot.info/articles/1000/the-future-of-electronic-paper.html
http://64.202.120.86/upload/image/articles/2007/the-future-of-electronic-paper/cholesteric-liquid-crystal-.jpg
http://www.pvi.com.tw/index_en.php
Sandy Chatterjee, Analyst
Right Horizons Research Desk