EXCLUSIVE footage of a flexible e-paper display module, which will be made available to Amazon and the wider e-reader market by mid-2010, to enable larger screen sizes whilst making these products slimmer and more rugged.
The display (a 9.7 inch module filmed in the video) is made using existing processes in LCD production. A sheet of glass is coated with a polymer layer and transistor circuits are fabricated on top within a standard TFT-LCD line. A laser separates the plastic from the glass, resulting in a flexible active matrix e-paper display, while the glass base can be re-used.
Flexible e-paper displays based on the Electronics on Plastic by Laser Release (EPLaR) process, should be coming off production lines at Prime View International (PVI) by the end of the second quarter of 2010 and commercialising in new e-readers soon after, such as Amazon's Kindle range. The Taiwanese display company, which recently acquired e-paper display firm E Ink, licenses the EPLaR technology from Philips, where it was developed by Ian French (video credit).
The first e-readers to use flexible displays will cost more to buy than the glass-based products available on the market now, but it means their screens can be made larger for displaying more types of content other than text, without creating heavier and more cumbersome devices if glass were to be used. Eventually the displays will be cheaper to produce on plastic than glass, as demand for flexible modules swells and competing processes, from the likes of LG, Samsung and HP, come on stream.
Documents and links
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Video footage of a flexible e-paper display
The display has been fabricated on the same equipment used to make LCD displays, using a technique developed by Philips, called EPLaR
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The Electronic Displacement of Print
A Pira market report with forecasts to 2018 of e-paper, e-readers and other innovations and technologies displacing and impacting print
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