By Marcelo Duran
Assistant Editor

E Ink and Gyricon are two firms that are in a race for the mass production of electronic paper and hope their vision of the future will have as much of an impact on the world as the Gutenberg press.

In some ways, electronic paper is produced much like a sheet of paper. It comes from a pulp and the finished product has the flexibility to be rolled into scrolls of papyrus, (such as E Ink’s development of flexible transistors). However, the major difference between paper produced from a tree and paper produced in a laboratory is that information on an electronic paper sheet can be altered thousands of times and not degrade over time.

For some paper products, this may be the
paper pulp of the future.
Photo courtesy of Gyricon Media/Xerox PARC

Both companies are spinoffs of major research institutions, Xerox’s famous Palo Alto Research Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Library. Both companies are on a similar timetable of when they expect their products to be ready.

“Within the next five years the technologies will have evolved far enough for multiple products to be produced at affordable rates for deep market assimilation,” said Scott Tatro, director of national accounts at Gyricon Media.

The concept of a reusable paper product is an environmentally sound idea considering that a major portion of the world’s paper goes to printing newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, etc. According to the International Institute for Environment and Development, global consumption of paper multiplied by 24 times in the 20th century and 13 percent of the world’s paper consumption is in the form of newsprint.

Estimates from the World Watch Institute state that the United States consumes 30 percent of the world’s paper. Pulp and paper are the fifth-largest industrial energy consumers in the world. It takes as much power to produce one ton of product as the iron and steel industry.

The heart of reusable paper for both companies lies in the millions of tiny bichromal beads that can be manipulated with electrical impulse and retain the information on the sheet indefinitely with its own internal power supply. Nearly 30 million beads are in an 11-by-10.5-inch piece of SmartPaper from Gyricon.

Electronic paper shares similar properties with its organic counterpart. It is reflective and can be viewed at different angles like paper and is readable in ambient light. This is an advantage of LCD displays that require backlight and are difficult to read in the sunlight.

Gyricon: SmartPaper

Gyricon Media Inc. headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., was founded in 2000 by the staff of former PARC researchers from Xerox Corp. who developed the SmartPaper technology.

A Gyricon sheet is a thin layer of transparent plastic in which millions of small beads are randomly dispersed. Each of the beads are contained in an oil-filled cavity and are free to rotate within those cavities.

The beads contain hemispheres of two contrasting colors and are charged so they exhibit an electrical dipole. When voltage is applied to the surface of the sheet, the beads rotate to present one colored side to the viewer. Voltages can be applied to the surface to create images such as text and pictures. The image will continue until new voltage patterns are applied.

“Digital information can be transmitted to a receiving device attached to the SmartPaper via radio frequency Blue Tooth, Infrared or virtually any network protocol,” said Tatro. “The pixel points or dots are created when a very small voltage is sent to a specific location on the paper. The Gyricon beads rotate revealing either their black side or white side depending on the current selected.”

Resolution for SmartPaper is at least 100 dots per inch, and they hope to soon have it improved to 300 dpi. Images displayed on SmartPaper are held indefinitely until a new electrical signal is applied. A networked programmable sign will run for two years on three AA batteries. There is the capacity for limited color schemes, like black-and-white and other bichromal colors.

The development of a product for the print industry is underway. In the meantime, Gyricon developed SmartPaper for use in department stores. Macy’s department store was the first company to experiment by placing SmartPaper signs in the children’s section at a New Jersey store.

SmartPaper is capable of projecting simple images with text but in the future color photos and other graphics might become a reality for electronic paper.

“The technology for color in SmartPaper is already patented and we expect to remain at the cutting edge in bringing this breakthrough to the marketplace.”

E Ink: Ink-in-motion and beyond

Last year, E Ink demonstrated a working prototype of flexible paper-like electronic display by demonstrating a working prototype of the displays built on thin sheets of plastic.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company has collaborated with various companies like Lucent Technologies and made rapid moves to produce reusable paper with electronic ink.

In September 2001, E Ink also announced the creation of the world’s first facility devoted exclusively to develop flexible transistors for use in electronic displays. This moved the company one step closer to the advent of devices for use in various types of trade industries, including the newspaper industry.

The next step for E Ink was to produce their first commercialized product, Ink-in-Motion, developed to target the $17-billion point-of-purchase media industry. The kit comes with varying sizes of paper-thin sheets that display flashing images and animations, powered by two AA batteries that can provide up to a year of continuous operation. The plastic sheets can be custom made in sizes up to 9-by-22 inches.

Philips Components, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, and an investor in E Ink, has plans to implement the electronic ink technology as early as next year.

“Philips will be glass-based and targeted at the electronic reader and smart handheld devices markets in mid 2003,” said Darren Bischoff, marketing manager at E Ink. “These products will allow users to experience all the advantages that come from the paper-like look of E Ink’s electronic ink display material.”

The main difference between Gyricon’s SmartPaper and E Ink is that the paper produced by E Ink takes on qualities similar to ink used in organic paper.

To create an E Ink electronic display, the ink is printed onto a sheet of plastic film that is laminated to a layer of circuitry. The circuitry forms a pattern of pixels that can then be controlled by a display driver. These microcapsules are suspended in a liquid carrier medium allowing them to be printed using existing screen printing processes onto virtually any surface.

Each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule where they become visible to the user. An opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden.

All of E Ink’s progress is leading up to their ultimate goal, RadioPaper, which they hope to produce in the coming years.

“The ultimate dream of E Ink is RadioPaper a dynamic high-resolution electronic display that combines a paper-like reading experience with the ability to access information anytime, anywhere,” said Bischoff. “This RadioPaper will be thin and flexible just like organic paper and could be used to create an electronic book or newspaper with real pages that can be leafed through, thumbed over and read on the beach.”