Plastic Logic rolling in government roubles

E-Reader prototyper Plastic Logic has hooked in some Russian cash to continue operations, and will be opening a Russian factory to start the manufacture of something or other. We don't know exactly what that factory will be making, or how much money the Russian tax-payer is investing. Plastic Logic officially gave up on the …

[John Smith 19]

Always was a tricky sell.

Dirt cheap transistors produced in ridiculous quantities on *huge* flexible substrates.

Brilliant.

Except.

The transistors are not *that* small, so it's a good thing those substrate *can* be magazine (or even broadsheet) sized.

The transistors are not *that* fast (the equation relating switching time, electron mobility and dimensions is a standard of most books on chips design). We're talking *low* Mhz,

You hear *much* less about other parts of the hardware, battery tech (although an Israeli company do paper based solid electrolyte disposables for credit card sized apps), printable PZ transducer (and what about the crystals for clocks) ? IR transceiver for an IrDA link (does anyone remember them?) As for *any* kind of RF gadget (every other kind of wireless comm link up to GSM) well you might go with Piezoelectric SAW methods but you'll still need some kind of Ghz level non linear device tech.

And the *real* killer

The *architecture* to make this tech *do* something something interesting, profitable and maybe (just maybe) a bit cool.

Xerox PARC with their "plaque" concepts looked promising and the MIT "Things That Think" looked like they should have been talked to. Protocols that would make swapping your old dirt cheap (but unreliable) 'puter for a fresh new one out of a dispenser and make "data migration" no more difficult than changing your socks.

They've had a *long* time to deliver *something* but come up with jack.