Engineers at the University of Cincinnati have shown that under
the right conditions, ordinary paper can be as dynamic as any
"Nothing looks better than
paper for reading," says research leader Andrew Steckl. "We
hope to have something that would actually look like paper but
behave like a computer monitor in terms of its ability to store
information. We would have something that is very cheap, very fast,
full-colour and at the end of the day or the end of the week, you
could pitch it into the trash."
Steckl's e-paper uses electrowetting -- moving coloured pigments from
pixel to pixel with electronic charges -- on a paper substrate.
Electrowetting offers colour, fast response times and video
capability that current E Ink electrophoretic screens can't match,
but with similarly low power consumption.
Companies like Liquavista and Plastic Logic have prototype
colour e-readers that use this technology, but apply the
electrowetting chemicals to a sheet of glass. The Cincinati team
says its electrowetted paper offers the same performance as glass,
but with greater flexibility and at a lower cost.
Steckl and grad student Duk Young Kim of U of C's
Nanoelectronics Laboratory presented their findings in the October
issue of the American Chemical Society's ACS Applied Materials
and Interfaces journal. It was then reviewed in the November
issue of Nature Photonics. The research was part of Kim's
"One of the main goals of e-paper is to replicate the look and
feel of actual ink on paper," write Steckl and Kim in the ACS
article. "We have, therefore, investigated the use of paper as the
perfect substrate for EW devices to accomplish e-paper on
"In general, this is an elegant method for reducing device
complexity and cost, resulting in one-time-use devices that can be
totally disposed after use," the researchers note.