Side view: Unlike other devices, the light emitting polymer (LEP) from Cambridge Display Technologies Ltd. of England can be seen from the side, making possible new devices with a wide-angle viewing range.

Advances in flat panel displays renew promise of digital paper

Flatter than a pancake? Certainly. Flatter than a fritter? Probably.

You've probably already seen, and perhaps even ogled, some of the new "flat" computer monitors now retailing in the thousand-dollar range, give or take a few hundred bucks.

They're well worth the cost, since most of us long ago gave up the fantasy of a paperless office, and are as eager for a few more square inches of desktop real estate as the prairie homesteaders and California gold miners were for their versions of the future.

Measured in cybertime, it's been the equivalent of a century since our industry heard the first whispered rumors of a viable electronic newspaper, which replicated all the flexibility and portability of paper, could be plugged into a dock for instant updates -- and was flat, flat, flat.

Roger Fidler was a fellow at the Freedom Forum in the early part of the decade when he began working out a prototype for an electronic newspaper. He wasn't then, and still isn't, exactly preaching to the choir.

Among late adopters, Fidler's concept of the electronic newspaper may still sound more like science fiction than reality, especially among the many newspapers still trying to figure out where on-line products fit into their capital expense budget, or to others still pondering how to fit them into a revenue stream.

And in general, even the most progressive newspapers have, for the most part, kept themselves busy just trying to develop a workable theory for Internet-based electronic newspapers -- struggling with content, design, delivery schedules and business models.

After considerable time, the more progressive have begun to realize that news on the Internet requires more than just reproducing ink-on-paper content in electronic form. That nascent vision promises to expand beyond the bounds of imagination with the multimedia-merging marathon we've endured, gone into debt for and tried desperately to stay on top of, for slightly less than a decade now.

Just as earlier content delivery vehicles were seen as extensions of existing technology (television extended the capabilities of radio, telephones extended the reach of the telegraph), Fidler said that "practically every form of paper-based document used today -- newsletters, sales materials, speeches, catalogs, brochures -- will migrate to tablets.

"But once we can effectively blend hypertext, video, audio and transactional services into the traditional document, who knows where cyber media will lead us?"

While newspapers and any number of their competitors are creating new content, design and delivery models built around electronic delivery, scientists in research laboratories around the world are engaged in developing technologies which seek to mimic the very best qualities that have made ink-on-paper such an enduring part of our culture.

More than ever, these technologies have the potential to relegate ink-stained fingerprints to a nostalgic and romanticized past.

Creative collaborations
Collaboration between academic research laboratories and business is an increasingly frequent phenomenon that produces income for universities, and research and development potential for corporations.

Such partnerships at England's Cambridge University and Ohio's Kent State University have two long-time citizens of the newspaper world working right alongside the physicists.

Now a professional-in-residence and adjunct professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Kent State, Fidler will become a full professor with tenure next year. He spends a considerable amount of his time at Kent's Liquid Crystal Institute (LCI), which has been a world leader in the development of liquid crystal display technology since 1965.

LCI is also the home of the National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Center for Advanced Liquid Crystalline Optical Materials, a consortium that provides a link between the academic and business worlds.

In 1995, Fidler was head of the Knight Ridder Information Design Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., when he visited Kent State. Afterward, he suggested a partnership with LCI to work on digital tablet technology for newspapers. A $100,000 grant for the project and the closing of the Knight Ridder laboratory persuaded Pamela Creedon, the director of the school, to suggest that Fidler join the faculty.

From the supplier side comes Danny Chapchal, once the chief executive of what is now Atex Media Solutions of Bedford, Mass., and now the head of Cambridge Display Technologies Ltd. (CDT), a commercial offshoot of England's Cambridge University, where light emitting polymers (LEP) were discovered in 1989.

At CDT, which was founded in 1992, Chapchal's chief task is to join business know-how with pure science research to develop applied technologies. Prior to his appointment as chief executive of CDT in March 1996, the company's business model was based on vertical integration.

Chapchal posed the notion of becoming a technology licensing house. "CDT cannot set up manufacturing and take on the world," said Chapchal. "We work with the big boys to promulgate the use of LEPs, but are at their mercy regarding marketing."

The proposal became reality within a couple of months. The first license went to Holland's Royal Philips Electronics in September 1996 for use of LEP as backlight displays on mobile phones. LEP displays are also likely to provide mobile phones with the capacity to carry even more information than they do now.

"What makes LEP screens so different," said Chapchal, "is that it uses all existing technology, but the screen can be so small" -- as thin as two millimeters -- "that you can put a PC screen on a bottle."

Why would you want to? Because there may be new ways to do old things. For example, discussions between CDT and label manufacturers may lead to "intelligent labels," which could be used in pharmaceuticals where "a tiny LEP label" could be used to keep a record of dosages and effects, as well as price and contents.

Larger formats make sense as well. Among the uses Chapchal foresees for LEPs are thin-screened PC displays that can pop up or be pushed back down, freeing that valuable desktop real estate. Prototype screens, only 50 millimeters square by two millimeters thick, can already show full television pictures, and prototype screens for use in notebooks are expected by 2004.

The viability of LEPs as "electronic paper," however, depends on commercial viability, and on CDT's partners, which include Intel, Hoechst,Uniax and Seiko-Epson (one of the world's largest liquid crystal display manufacturers), as well as the rock group Genesis.

Polymer physics, crystal chemistry
The difference between LEPs and LCDs occurs at the levels of molecules and sub-atomic particles.

Light emitting polymers (LEP) are self-reflective -- different polymers glow in different ways when exposed to ultraviolet light. An LEP is a thin film made by spinning plastic at high speeds (conjugated) which responds to ultraviolet light.

CDT holds the patents on use of the conjugated polymers used to produce LEP displays. In the manufacturing process, layers of polymer are sandwiched between two charge-injecting, etched electrodes.

Pixels are formed by the crossing points of the electrodes -- one etched horizontally and the other vertically -- and are individually addressable, and scalable to larger and smaller sizes.

Eventually, polymers, because of their conductive qualities, may replace copper on interconnects on printed circuit boards.

Liquid crystals, on the other hand, have to do with matter that exists in a long ignored state -- not liquid, solid or gas but, like mayonnaise, something that's somewhere in between. Organic matter has different optical qualities -- such as brightness or opacity -- in each of these four states.

While this phenomenon was observed as early as 1850, and again in 1888 and 1922, the technology was basically ignored until 1958, after which it began to find consumer uses in the digital watches and handheld calculators of the 1970s, and in laptop computer displays of the 1980s.

Research and development are ongoing. LCI researchers have made a prototype of a four-inch-square display with a resolution of 80 dots per inch that uses flexible polyester substrates sandwiched between two etched electrodes.

Fidler believes the Cholesteric Liquid Crystal Display (ChLCD) technology invented at Kent State is the most promising for document-based portable reading devices because "it's highly reflective, bistable, requires no power to maintain images on the display, can be manufactured on plastic substrates and is relatively inexpensive."

Scientists have their work cut out for them, because a successful technology must meet standards for reflectivity, contrast ratio, brightness, stability, resolution, flicker, format size, viewing angle, power consumption, readability in the sun, and, of course, reliability. One successful but old-fashioned technology is ... ink on paper.