| Alan Hodgson at CoPADD 2007 |
| Saturday, 09 February 2008 | |
CoPADD (Collaborating over Paper and Digital Document)Dr Alan Hodgsons reports on the CoPADD 2007 meeting held at the Institute of Physics in London in November
2007.
This was the second international COPADD workshop, held as a
joint meeting with the Institute of Physics Printing and Graphics
Sciences group . I went along to this meeting as a presenter of a paper
on Printed Electronics. However, there was content and speakers here of
interest to litho printers and ink makers. You will find an agenda for this meeting here which gives some indication of the interests of CoPADD. Anoto print technology figured strongly at this meeting. One of the benefits of meetings such as this is to see what other groups are doing with printing technology to enhance the value of the printed product. They are also great networking events! 1.1 Background to CoPADD CoPADD aims to bring together researchers, academics and developers interested in new technologies that exploit the advantages of paper. Their focus is on technologies that augment rather than replace paper, utilising its key attributes of mobility, flexibility and robustness. Their interest is in new technologies like digital pens and paper, paper-like displays and other ways of augmenting paper. They seek to attract to their meetings the following audience. 1. Those developing new technologies 2. Those who have developed applications based on technologies that are currently commercially available. 3. Those researching into the ways paper is currently used in different environments and who could inform these new developments. Although the aims are rather wide the focus of this meeting seemed to be almost exclusively on Anoto technology . 1.2 Background to Anoto Anoto are a Swedish company that combine digital pen and paper technology to convert handwritten information from business forms into digital documents. The paper writing stock is printed with a matrix of small black dots in an approximately square pitch of 0.3mm. Their exact position defines a digital code that tells the pen the area on the paper on which it is writing. It also defines the sheet of paper in use – the code is sufficiently complex that many millions of sheets can be printed without duplication. The key attribute of the black ink is that it is also black to infra-red so is probably exclusively carbon black based. The Anoto pen contains both a traditional pen and an infra-red source and detector. This allows the user to write conventionally. The electronics in the pen note the position of this writing and store this data. This allows the electronics to interpret this into digital documents. There is an interesting opportunity here for groups with infra red dye technology. A colourless infra red absorbing dye or pigment that can be assembled into a conventional printing ink may find a ready market here. 1.3 Format of the meeting The invitation went out with the aim of attracting a wide range of disciplines including the social sciences, human-computer interaction, information sciences, ubiquitous computing and collaborative systems, as well as experts in paper, printing, digital pen and screen technologies. Approximately 35 delegates were registered for the meeting. 1.4 Key points from the presentations 1.4.1 KCL The first presentation of the day came from KCL, a research service company based in Finland. The presentation covered a project to combine printed technology with mobile phones, reading printed 2D bar codes with phone cameras. 1.4.2 Brunel A group from Brunel presented some work on PaperWorks , an EU funded project to augment paper. Their hand held reader senses a low visibility conductive layer on the paper. This conductive layer is modulated by non-conductive printed lacquer. The Brunel group were working to design the wireless reader. The coating of a conductive layer onto paper may well be an enabling technology for what is to follow in printed electronics on paper – see below. It could for example form the backplane of a paper based display. The group from Brunel were interesting. The Cleaner Electronics Research Group within the university have been using offset litho presses to produce passive components (batteries, connections etc) for printed electronics and have produced a handbook of conductive lithographic films . They have worked with a number of substrates including paper, card and plastics. They find that best results are achieved from smooth but moderately absorbent materials such as synthetic and filled papers and polyethylene based synthetic papers. The Cleaner Electronics Group has demonstrated a membrane switch keyboard printed onto paper. They believe that the high production speed and low volume /unit ink requirements of offset lithographic printing can offer environmental benefits such as: • Reduced non-renewable resource use – polyester is replaced by paper/cellulose material. • Lower energy per unit manufacturing cost. • Reduced raw material use as the quantity of deposited silver conductor is reduced. 1.4.3 Alan Hodgson Consulting I was at this conference to put over my initial views on the role of paper in printed electronics. It was important for this audience to set out the reasons for and market research on the field of printed electronics. The paper then moves on to look at the options in terms of printing substrates and techniques using inkjet printing as an example. The paper then moved on to look at the issue of fluid – substrate interactions and finished with a summary of the remaining challenges. The full paper can be found on the CoPADD conference website.
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