Plastic Logic, a spin-out of the University of Cambridge, has signed a collaboration agreement with the institution’s Graphene Centre to work on a specific research programme with the end goal of commercial exploitation of the “wonder material”.
Plastic, which has enjoyed $196m in external investment from a number of investors including Intel, Bank of America and Siemens since founding in 2000, specialises in producing plastic electronics.
The firm is donating deposition equipment to the Graphene Centre in order to accelerate manufacturing scale-up on graphene tech. In particular, the two will be working together to develop a transparent, highly conductive layer for plastic backplanes used to drive unbreakable LCD and flexible OLEDs – a market estimated to be worth $40bn by the end of the decade.
Graphene, often dubbed the “wonder material” for its diverse range of applications, was originally isolated at the University of Manchester.
Indro Mukerjee, chief executive of Plastic Logic, said: “I am delighted that Plastic Logic is working with the world class team at the Cambridge Graphene Centre on this transformational research programme for the application of graphene in our flexible plastic electronics process. This will enable higher levels of customisation and drive a step change in technology performance, opening up new commercial applications, such as the huge potential market for large area distributed sensors.”
