One Word: Plastics; The next big thing in electronics may be talking magazine ads, smart spray paint and foldable displays.(Cambridge University)

Byline: Rana Foroohar

For someone who may turn out to be the father of ubiquitous computing, Sir Richard Friend is a hard guy to track down. Phone calls made to his two laboratories at Britain's Cambridge University, where he is a professor of physics, go unanswered, as do e-mails sent to the offices of both of his high-tech companies, Plastic Logic and Cambridge Display Technology (CDT). "Have the college porter leave a message in his pigeonhole," advises a Cambridge neighbor. How long the note will languish in its wooden box before Friend retrieves it is anyone's guess. One can only hope for the day when his technology might allow smart pigeonholes spray-painted with plastic microchips to alert their owners to new handwritten messages.

Friend--who, it turns out, is on sabbatical at Cornell University--is the unlikely instigator of what may very well be the next computing revolution: plastic electronics. While most electronic devices today are powered by chips made of silicon, Sir Richard, whom the Queen of England recently knighted for his pioneering work, sees a future in which electronic devices of all kinds--mobile phones, televisions, watches, computers and so on--use chips and/or display screens made of plastic. This vision is based on two discoveries. In 1988 Friend published a paper in the scientific journal Nature showing that polymers--i.e., plastic--could be fashioned into working transistors. A second paper two years later announced that he had created light-emitting diodes, bits of plastic that glowed when electricity passed through them.

The diode paper became one of the most cited ever in the physical sciences. It led to a new generation of lighter, thinner, brighter, cheaper and more flexible electronic OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens, which are now being used on everything from flat electronic shavers to mobile phones to disposable electronic greeting cards (the intellectual property behind many of these devices stems from CDT). The transistor paper, which resulted in the launch of Plastic Logic in 2000, could eventually lead to talking cereal boxes, advertising posters that spring to life and speak to you as you walk by and other technologies from the movie "Minority Report." Plastic chips, which can potentially be spray-painted onto everything from walls to cars, "have the power to change the whole way we think of the human-machine interface," says Friend. Among the possibilities: rooms that change color with the weather and pillboxes that tell you when to take your medication.

It sounds farfetched, but the basic technology is already on the market. Philips, a CDT licensee, recently put out an electric shaver (the Sensotec 8894) with an OLED screen. A year ago British retailer Marks & Spencer released an electronic Valentine's Day card containing the world's first-ever disposable color screen powered by light-reflecting plastics. The card was a silly cartoon with a low-quality display, but it showed that an electronic screen could be cheap enough to throw away--and pointed to new advertising possibilities.

This year a number of major display companies will be coming out with OLED screens for digital cameras, mobile phones and other gadgets. While these screens will have glass backings, within a few years it will be possible to put high-quality color screens on flexible materials. Translation: electronic screens that could be rolled up and put into your pocket, powering everything from PDAs to e-books. Already several companies, including Philips and Xerox, are working on "e-paper"--flexible screens with electrically charged black-and-white particles that can form words. And last week the U.S. Army gave $50 million to Arizona State University to create thin computer screens that could be folded up and put in a soldier's pocket. The market for OLED screens will reach $2.7 billion by 2007, predicts U.S. market-research firm DisplaySearch.

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