E-paper - Combining Electronics And Paper

The days may not be very far when you will carry a small diary in your pocket made with the next version of paper for sending mails and reading e-books. An article was published recently in this section about the use of electronic chips in bank notes to prevent counterfeiting. I will tell you about more interesting applications of an e-paper i.e. the combination of electronic chips and paper.

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Research is being carried out at many universities about the information carrying ability of paper. According to Mr Daniel Torbjork, who is working on this problem at Abo Akademi University in Finland, conducting paper can be used in many applications such as energy storage devices, sensors, electric heaters, electric field emitters, antistatic coatings, and electromagnetic shields etc. Mr Daniel has started developing a low voltage organic transistors and a roll-to-roll printing system. Some of their work is being supported by a Finnish paper company. He feels that the major obstacles are the roughness, porosity and the chemical impurities of the paper. Interestingly, there are few people who are not in favour of using paper as a conducting material. Instead they feel that other materials such as glass and metal can do quite well. A Dublin-based company named SolarPrint and Italian carmakers Fiat have developed a glass with tiny photovoltaic cells embedded in it. They say that it can capture solar energy which is almost 10% of the total energy needs of a car.

I also think that the successful and efficient application of this technology to consumer electronics will take some time. Due to the delicate and light-weight nature of paper, it is obviously difficult to integrate chips and transistors with paper, the combined weight of which can be sometimes much greater than the bundle of papers. Ultra Large Scale Integration (ULSI) is perhaps the only solution to make these e-paper devices ready for commercial launch. A small computer using a similar technology called E-ink was unveiled recently at Association of Computing Machinery's CHI 2011 in Vancouver.

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