I have Taiwan and its Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) on my radar this week. After announcing the results of their Global Nano contest, they announced a breakthrough for electronic paper technology. From the Oct. 10, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute), Taiwan’s largest and one of the world’s leading high-tech research and development institutions, introduces i2R e-Paper™, the first electronic paper technology to provide a re-writable, re-usable and environmentally friendly recyclable print medium — an “electronic paper” — to reduce traditional paper consumption. ITRI will receive a “2011 R&D 100 Award” from R&D Magazine next week for this breakthrough technology.

i2R e-Paper™ can be manufactured in a variety of sizes. It will limit waste on short-lived business initiatives such as advertising banners, corporate visitor ID badges, transit passes, and museum or parking lot tickets. In the future, the technology may be used for producing digital books and pictorials without restriction on length, wall banners, large size electronic bulletin boards and other innovative applications. It is highly flexible and bendable.

Here’s a little more information about the technology,

i2R e-Paper™, whether note card or banner roll size, does not consume electricity to maintain an image. To print and change content, users simply need a thermal printer fitted with a thermal head. Heat generated from the thermal head uses minimal power consumption and interacts with the environmentally friendly composition of the e-Paper to capture an image. Re-using the i2R e-Paper™ is as easy as putting it back into any thermal printer device. The old image is removed and replaced with a new one — no ink, no toner and no paper are consumed.

…

ITRI’s patented cholesteric liquid crystal technology is not the same cholesterol generally referred to in the biomedical industry, but rather has a structure similar to cholesterol molecules. Cholesteric liquid crystal is a reflective display technology. It utilizes ambient light sources from the external environment to display images, does not require any backlighting and doesn’t consume power in maintaining the display of content or diagrams. The cholesteric liquid crystal can produce red, green and blue colors by adding different pitch spherical composite ion-exchangers to produce different colors. It is also one of the future display materials for color e-books.

It’ll be interesting to see if businesses and consumers accept this new technology. ITRI is licensing i2R e-Paper™ in Taiwan and is in talks with interested US companies, according to the news item.

I first wrote about electronic paper in my May 1, 2009 posting where, inevitably, Neal Stephenson’s book Diamond Age is mentioned along with one of that year’s breakthroughs.