Cool printed-electronics gadgets

December 4, 2008
I'm in San Jose this week for the Printed Electronics USA event, and among all the developments getting covered here, far and away the coolest things are the gadgets that are either on the drawing board or, yes, near commercialization. Here are just a few.The Morph from Nokia: The 2008 concept is a 360-deg flexible, stretchable and transformable cellphone (if you could call it only that). The system is also a PDA, Blackberry, digital camera and Bluetooth headset that disassembles into modular components as needed. You could wear it like a wristwatch or unfold it to an 8 x 10-in. touchscreen. Some of the technology is based on carbon nanotube network (CNTN)-based transistors on a flexible substrate. Rigid islands for the circuitry would be embedded into an elastic, flexible base. Functional surface materials that are self-cleaning with oil- and water-phobic behavior will be necessary for this "cellphone" that can also become a piece of apparel.The eReader from Plastic Logic: There are 13 electronic readers on the worldwide market now, and this flexible, plastic-display version is likely to be commercialized by mid-2009. It weighs less than 1 lb, measures a full 8-½ x 11 in., is only ¼ in. thick, and can hold gigabytes worth of memory. But the best part is the eReader's screen is completely readable is bright sunlight. It now has 8 shades of grey and by 2010, Plastic Logic hopes to have a 16-level greyscale model, followed closely by a color version.The eMenu from Stora Enso Packaging Boards: I thought you go out to eat in part to save some work, but the eMenu will have you doing some of the waiter's job. It's the size of a placemat, about 1 mm thick, and has 12 to 64 buttons on it to choose what you want to order. Press the "Send" button and it communicates wirelessly with the restaurant kitchen up to 30 meters away. The first commercial demonstrations are set for late 2009 on eMenus that are expected to cost only a few dollars each and last through weeks of heavy use.The RF Barcode from Kovio: From the people who last year brought you the first silicon-based, inkjet-printed transistor comes an HF 13.56 MHz, RFID-integrated barcode with 128 bits of RAM. Beta tests are planned for Q1 next year with commercialization forecasted for mid-2009. Being printed with silicon ink, Kovio touts the RF Barcode as very "green." It reportedly uses 5 percent of the chemicals, produces 0.005 percent of the hazardous gases, and consumes only 25 percent of the power to manufacture versus traditional silicon-chip production.
SUMLUNG Tech. (http://www.sumlung.com/) (info@sumlung.com) is an emerging high tech enterprise, in 2D and 1D barcode image recognition field. We focus on developing creative and cost-effective barcode products for mobile phone, such as Bluetooth barcode scanner suite, barcode reader software and device, barcode scanning basis on mobile phone, which provide the basic products for solution enterprise. We look forward to mobile applications of 2D and 1D barcode.