E-screen project to bring colour to new technology
A £12m project to develop the technology that will eventually allow e-readers to display in colour has been launched by Liquavista and Plastic Logic.
The three year research programme will allow the two companies to develop next generation flexible electronic displays using Liquavista’s patented electrowetting technology.
Applications could include e-magazines, watches, phones, secondary displays on laptops, and consumer or medical devices with an electronic display.
Liquavista, a spin-out company of Philips Research Labs, is expanding its scientific and engineering team in Cambridge by recruiting 15 technical and five commercial staff members.
It launched its first display platform using its electrowetting technology earlier this month, aimed at watches and mobile phone secondary displays.
Liquavista vp marketing and sales, Simon Jones, told PRW.com: “It’s great news for the UK. It’s showing we have the continued ability to create these leading technologies, and build and maintain a national competence in plastic electronics and display.”
The research will be partially funded by the government sponsored Technology Strategy Board.
“There will be some commercialisation phase after, and possibly parallel, with the back end of the development project,” Jones added. “It’s not going to be one big leap because there will be simple flexible displays first and then gradually more complex displays.”
An image is formed on an electrowetting display when a voltage is applied to a coloured oil – this makes the oil contract. The technology will create thin, flexible and light screens that display bright, colourful images and show video content with low power consumption.
More than 90% of the manufacturing cycle uses standard LCD manufacturing equipment and processes.
The majority of Liquavista’s next generation display research is currently carried out in its Eindhoven facility in The Netherlands. The company has 60 staff worldwide – this number does not include the new hires.
The new jobs would be split between the company’s office in Abbotsley, outside Cambridge, and Plastic Logic’s Cambridge offices.
The displays will initially use plastic substrates as the carrier for the TFT backplane. Jones said there could be a plastic backplane on products within two to three years.
“It’s the subject of active development,” he said.
“Some of the research from [the Plastic Logic joint project] and some of our own research independent of that project will together help to develop [a plastic backplane].”