Nanotechnology yields nanotransistors and nanowires, and e-paper you can see through!
The folks over at Purdue University have decided not to let the uber-geeks from MIT have all the e-print fun. They've created an entirely transparent e-paper.
(Please note that the image here isn't the stuff -- the uber-geeks at Purdue haven't provided any actual images, so I had to make due)
The first image that flashes to my mind is this stuff, over a white background, with a back-light behind that, or maybe in between.
The first things that popped into their minds, evidently, included: "e-paper and flexible color screens for consumer electronics to 'smart cards' and 'heads-up' displays in auto windshields."
Most of the linked write up is recapitulation of the advantages of e-papers vis a vis conventional display techs, plus discussion of how previous approaches failed to yield fully transparent results. And a fair amount of disjointed exuberance over what they've done -- arguably well earned exuberance.
You can get the gist of what they've accomplished from the study's Abstract:
Quote:
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ABSTRACT
Fabrication of Fully Transparent Nanowire Transistors for Transparent and Flexible Electronics
SANGHYUN JU1, ANTONIO FACCHETTI 3, YI XUAN1, JUN LIU3, FUMIAKI ISHIKAWA2, PEIDE YE1, CHONGWU ZHOU2, TOBIN J. MARKS 3*AND DAVID B. JANES 1*
1School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University; 2Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California; 3Department of Chemistry and the Materials Research Center, and the Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing, Northwestern University
In this study, the authors have demonstrated fully-transparent thin-film transistors (TFTs) on both glass and flexible plastic substrates. The TFTs utilize wide-bandgap semiconductor nanowires as the active channels, and transparent conducting oxides for the gate, source and drain electrodes. The transistors exhibit good performance characteristics, including relatively high on currents (up to 10 microamps per nanowire) and high on/off current ratios (required for digital applications in order to achieve low power operation).
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For those who want as much detail as they can get, here's the
full article.
A special thanks to "The Watcher" over at the Baen Bar for pointing this out!