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Reports on companies that are pioneering technologies for electronic paper and have prototypes at various stages of development in fall 2000. Details of the rigid indoor display board called Immedia by E Ink Corporation; History of electronic paper; Invention of Nick Sheridon of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in California called Gyricon; Research at Kent Displays in Ohio on cholesteric liquid crystals; Outlook.

The article reports that researchers at the New University of Lisbon have discovered a way to make paper into a transistor. Details about the research, conducted by professors Elvira Fortunato and Rodrigo Martins, among others, are presented. The important role that transistors play in electronics is also explored.

This article examines the prospect of a molecular replacement for the transistor. Small may be beautiful, but it is also hard. This is the reality faced by those trying to make ever-smaller transistors, one of the key components of virtually all modern electronic devices. The laws of physics place a limit on how small they can become. This, then, is a tricky problem for those hoping to build future generations of computer chips that are vastly more powerful than today's. In a paper published this week in the "Journal of Applied Physics," researchers from Hewlett-Packard's laboratories in Palo Alto, California, suggest they may have cracked part of the problem. Hewlett-Packard's researchers have been tinkering in a new area known as molecular electronics. Instead of using light to etch a transistor circuit on a wafer of silicon, they propose to fabricate tiny wires. The molecular-scale alternative proposed to the transistor is called a "crossbar latch". The latch works by running an electrical current down a signal wire, through two switches. Phil Kuekes, one of the paper's authors, says the crossbar latch is the final piece of the puzzle necessary to build a molecular scale computer--something Hewlett-Packard's researchers plan to attempt next. They are, of course, not the only ones trying. The race to shrink electronic circuits will continue, even if and when the transistor falls by the wayside.

The author reports on a breakthrough in electronic plastics research. For years, researchers have been trying to craft electronic circuits that use plastic instead of metal to carry the current. Such circuits would be flexible, which would bring many advantages. They could, for example, form part of "electronic paper" displays that would be light and foldable--unlike existing liquid-crystal displays, which are heavy and rigid. Brian Elliott of TDA Research, a firm based in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, hopes to change that. Unfortunately, most known conducting polymers do not disperse in liquid solvents, and so cannot be made into products as easily as their workaday, non-conducting cousins are turned into drinks bottles and baby rattles. To produce a polymer that can be dispersed in inert solvents, Dr Elliott took ethylenedioxythiophene, the building block "monomer" from which PEDOT polymer is made, and tweaked it. As Dr Elliott recently demonstrated to America's National Science Foundation, a suitably patterned ultraviolet light source can "print" a conducting-polymer circuit on a surface covered with this version of Oligotron.