The consumer electronics world, as well as the printed electronics industry, have become enamored in recent months of a relatively small, flat device that many believe will represent a technological milestone when it comes into the marketplace later this year. The thing is an electronic reader – nothing new there – whose screen is a flexible polymer with printed electronic circuitry powering the images – everything new there. The manufacturer is Plastic Logic, headquartered in Mountain View, CA, USA, a company that has been enjoying the spotlight in a market that has been dominated by the glass-bound Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader.

Here’s what Sarah Perez of The New York Times had to say in early February: “A demonstration of this device at the past DEMO08 conference left many people amazed at how incredibly thin this potential ‘Kindle-killer’ is. The company says they’ve perfected a way of printing polymer transistors onto flexible plastic displays. This particular revolution won’t be just a transition to lighter and ‘bendier’ touchscreens, it will also lead to lower power consumption and longer battery life.”

Just last week, New Scientist reported: “The device will have wireless internet connection and a touch screen, allowing use of a virtual keyboard for annotating text. In contrast, the latest Sony Reader has a touch screen but no wireless connection, while the latest Kindle, which was launched this week in the US, connects to a book download store via 3G but wastes screen space with a manual keyboard.”

And a Wired blog ran this headline a few weeks back: “A Reader the Kindle Should Fear.”

The Plastic Logic Reader, due for preliminary launch later in 2009, has something that its predecessors do not possess: printed electronics. The advantages of polymer transistors over complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS) are that the new reader will use lower power and cost less to manufacture.

The reader is about 8.5” x 11” in size and features a screen larger than its competitors, meaning that magazine or newspaper pages will appear larger. The company plans to target business users, and so the reader will support Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and Adobe PDFs. The company announced in February that it had signed agreements with its first content partners: Ingram Digital (ebooks), LibreDigital (enewspapers), Zinio (emagazines), the Financial Times, and USA Today. No price has been attached to the Plastic Logic Reader yet, but company sources say that it will be competitive.

Besides turning heads at the recent Consumer Electronics Show – where Macworld wrote that the Plastic Logic Reader “certainly had a much higher visual quality than the range of eReaders we’ve tested recently” – the device and its technology have been closely watched within the printed electronics community. Noteworthy are two recent awards presented to the company. Its display technology earned it the IDTechEx Printed Electronics Award for Technical Development Device. The award, presented at the Printed Electronics USA conference in December, was given in recognition of the most significant development of a device or component in the printed electronics industry over the last 24 months. In October 2008, Plastic Logic was recognized by the Plastic Electronics Foundation with its Award for Innovation. The award recognized ‘Best Technology Developer 2008’ for the most innovative development in organic electronics – the development of Plastic Logic’s innovative new electronic reading device.

“The first difference between the Plastic Logic Reader and others is really obvious: the size of the display,” says Steven Glass, who is in charge of user experience and software product marketing at the company. “If you look at our product compared with other readers, they are about the same weight but ours is so much bigger. That’s the advantage of using a plastic screen. The size of our display is chosen to optimize reading of your typical business papers. Our 8.5” x 11” display is what you would expect to use if you were going to read hundreds of thousands of documents that are already on your computer. We also work well with other size documents, but that was the main focus of the reader.

“We are focusing on people who want to be able to read their business documents, of course, but part of your business documents are other content: newspapers, trade journals, magazines, and books in your off time,” says Glass. “It doesn’t make sense to have multiple readers. The research we have done shows that people are interested in all types of content.”

The Plastic Logic Reader – it might have a different name by the time the official launch rolls around – will be available commercially in the first part of 2010, Glass says. This year the company will conduct trials and pilot programs.

Plastic Logic was founded in 2000 by researchers at the Cambridge University Cavendish Laboratory, in England. “They were excited by the idea of building electronics using plastics,” Glass notes. They wanted to take advantage of inkjet technology to print on plastic, to make the transistors, and so on. As they progressed over the years, they inquired as to the right applications for plastic electronics. What really excited them was doing a display using e-ink technology.”

The company has received more than $200 million in funding from international technology firms and investors. Plastic Logic maintains research and development operations in Cambridge. Its manufacturing plant – with an area about as big as a football field – is in Dresden, Germany.

The Dresden factory began operations in September 2008. At its opening, Plastic Logic’s CEO Richard Archuleta described it as “the world’s first commercial scale plastic electronics manufacturing facility,” and called it “an extraordinary achievement for our company and the plastic electronics industry.”

Glass says that the factory was designed from scratch. “A great deal of capital investment went into it, and the technology is unique to what we are doing. It is filled with custom equipment.” Advanced new processes and tools were specified, designed and created to successfully transfer proof-of-concept technology and processes that were first developed at the Cambridge lab. “Plastic Logic utilized a unique mix of standard production equipment from display manufacturing and other industries that were tailored to produce displays in high volumes at costs to give it significant competitive advantage,” he says.

The manufacturing process involves the building of each screen through a total of about 80 distinct steps, some of which involve printing or spraying electronics onto the plastic film. A conductive sheet of ink, from E Ink, Cambridge, MA, USA, is laminated onto the plastic transistors. Pixels are activated by an electrical field that moves areas inside the E Ink sheet from white to black, or the reverse.

Production of prototypes has been lowered to a few days, which apparently is substantially lower than the weeks involved in producing readers with CMOS silicon chips. Plastic Logic has said it wants to cut manufacturing time down to 20 hours or less.

When a Plastic Logic Reader is in operation, the unit draws power from the battery only when images change. An image left on a screen uses no power. “Battery life depends on how much you use the reader,” says Steven Glass. “The interesting thing about E Ink is that you can make the screen show whatever you want, and until you change it you won’t use any power. Power use depends on how often you change the screen.”

One battery charge, he adds, will last for days, not hours.

So far, all eReaders display type and images in black, white and grays. “I think that everybody understands and desires color,” Glass says. “A lot of people are trying to innovate in that space. It’s hard to predict when that will happen.”