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World-wide CE Marking helps bring the digital reading experience closer to reality

When a new process line comprising of some 50 individual machines was switched on for the first time in September, it heralded the biggest step forward in the written word since Gutenberg conceived his original design for the printing press. The breakthrough comes courtesy of Plastic Logic, which built a multi-million dollar factory to prove its ground-breaking plastic electronics technology. Crucial to the successful installation of the process line was work carried out by Laidler Associates in CE marking each individual machine and the complete process.plastic0logic

A spin-off from Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory, Plastic Logic is at the forefront of plastic electronics manufacturing – a revolutionary new technology for printing electronic devices. And with its new plant in Dresden, the company will be the first to apply this new technology to a fully commercial application: flexible active-matrix displays for electronic readers. The Plastic Logic process fabricates active-matrix backplanes on plastic substrates which, when combined with an electronic-paper frontplane material, will deliver ‘take anywhere, read anywhere’ display modules that are thin, light and robust. This will enable a digital reading experience that is much closer to paper than any other technology.

Of course a key issue with building a plant to manufacture such a revolutionary technology is that there is no existing machine design to build the plant around. Having secured $100m of equity finance from a number of investors – the biggest financing deal in the history of European venture capital – Plastic Logic faced the challenge of working with machine builders across the globe. Numbering over 50, each machine builder was tasked with developing an individual segment of the production line to Plastic Logic’s specifications.

Dealing with machine builders in the likes of Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the USA in addition to companies in France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, raised the thorny issue of CE Marking. For some of the machine builders, the machines represented their first ever exports into Europe, so they had no experience with and no procedures for CE Marking. With Plastic Logic working against the clock to have its facility up and running by September, this represented a major issue.

To help its suppliers along on the CE Marking route, and ensure that all of its machines were delivered fully compliant with the European regulations, Plastic Logic turned to Laidler Associates, one of Europe’s leading safety consultants. In order to ensure that all of the manufacturing equipment complied with relevant legislation, Laidler consultants were employed to audit the various suppliers from a CE Marking perspective, looking both at the suppliers’ ability and the actual machines themselves.

Involving Laider Associates at the very earliest stages of the machine development processes  proved key to Plastic Logic meeting its September deadline for switch-on, by enabling the various machine builders to plan and implement compliance with safety legislation as an integral part of the project. Potential problems could be identified at the earliest stages when compliance can still be designed in. Laidler Associates also assumed responsibility for assembling all required documentation, and issuing the Declarations of Conformity to enable the various machines to be CE Marked. In total, over 50 visits have been carried out to supplier sites over the last 12 months, including to some of the most remote parts of Japan and Korea.

With this work completed, Plastic Logic were confident that every machine delivered to its Dresden plant was fully compliant with all relevant European legislation. Overall, the work of Laidler Associates potentially cut months from the process’s development cycle, whilst helping to ensure that all machines were right first time and delivered on time and within budget. The final task for the Laidler consultants was to visit the Dresden site to certify the various interfaces between the machines, before Plastic Logic were ready to start up the process and begin producing the revolutionary products.

“Plastic Logic’s research shows that consumers are very reluctant to read on laptops, phones and PDAs even in this age of pervasive digital content,” says Laidler Associates managing director Paul Laidler. “Enormous amounts of paper are still carried around, but people are making less room in their lives for the weight and bulk of paper and are becoming more sensitive to the environmental impact of printing to read. The Plastic Logic displays offer a genuine alternative to paper – it really is a technology that could fundamentally change the printing industry.”

An electronic reader built around a Plastic Logic display module can be up to three times the screen area for the equivalent weight of a typical 6in electronic reader product available today, ie approximately 250g. This is enabled by weight reduction in the display module and in the casing which no longer has to be engineered to be rigid to protect the glass backplane. The thinness, lightness and robustness enabled by the flexibility of Plastic Logic’s displays will, at last, enable electronic reader products that are as comfortable and natural to read as paper whether at the beach, in a train or relaxing on the sofa at home. Wireless connectivity will allow users to purchase and download a book or pick up the latest edition of a newspaper wherever and whenever they desire. The battery will last for thousands of pages allowing the charger to be left at home.

With its new Dresden facility, Plastic Logic will be able to demonstrate not only the viability of its products, but also how the printing-based process itself is so much more easily reconfigurable than traditional amorphous silicon production lines. This allows the display form factor to be dynamically driven by consumer preference rather than by the constraints of the manufacturing line. And if all goes to plan when the line is started-up in July, the ability to demonstrate these two key factors should be more than enough to secure further funding for additional production facilities, driving a new era in the printed word.
 

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