Monday, February 16 2004
A modest rollable display -- the first to be truly mass-produced -- is being churned out at the rate of 100 a week and may reach production levels of 1 million a year by the end of next year, said Bas J.E. van Rens, general manager of Polymer Vision, the division of Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands that makes the display.
The device is a rectangular screen just three times the thickness of a sheet of paper and measuring 5 inches diagonally. It curls into a tube less than 2 inches in diameter and soon may coil to the diameter of a fountain pen.
With the exception of some invisibly fine gold wires, the circuitry inlaid into this flexible page is plastic. An internal layer of "electronic ink drops" creates black text on a white background, giving the plastic sheet the look of a paperback page. It weighs just 3.5 grams, about the weight of 1 1/2 pennies.
Unlike standard computer and PDA displays, which generate tiny points of light, the E Ink system simply reflects ambient light off its white background, like a newspaper or book. So it is easily read outdoors in bright sun and at virtually any reading angle.
The E Ink system also draws far less power than light-emitting systems.
A thin layer of plastic underlying the display contains the electronics, including a paper-thin array of 80,000 plastic transistors, each of which is a minuscule electrical switch that can create a dot of white or black on the overlay.
