English Quiz 147

(English Quiz 147)

1. For Simon Jones, Vice President of product development at Plastic Logic, his company's mission comes down to this simple but startling question: "What if you could print electronics on just about anything at very low cost?" A corner office at the Cambridge, U.K., firm is filled with models of products that could be built: hospital bracelets synched to update when info is added to a medical file, musical scores that refresh so you'd never need to turn a page and a series of portable text displays. That, says Jones, is what happens when you can make circuits not from silicon but from plastic.

Q: 試翻 "hospital bracelets synched ... text displays."

2. In the race to market, Plastic Logic took an early and significant lead. On Jan. 3, the company announced it would build a factory in Dresden, Germany, to create its flexible, portable text display — a device that would let you carry your whole library on a sheet of plastic. That makes it the first plant proposed anywhere that would produce plastic transistors on a commercial scale. Plastic Logic's plant attracted $100 million from such backers as Oak Investment Partners, Intel, Bank of America and BASF. "We believe there is nothing silicon transistors can do that polymer transistors won't be able to do eventually," says Hermann Hauser, a former physicist and now a partner at Plastic Logic financier Amadeus Capital Partners Ltd. Others agree. On Jan. 24, an Eindhoven, Netherlands, spin-off from Philips unveiled plans for its own mass-production facility in Southampton, U.K. The firm, Polymer Vision, will make a 5-in. screen that can be rolled up to the thickness of a cell phone. But even though it announced its factory site after Plastic Logic's, the Dutch company plans to produce at commercial volumes sooner: as early as this year.

Q: 試翻 "On Jan. 24, ... in Southampton, U.K."

3. Has a new era of consumer electronics begun? Market researchers at Virginia-based NanoMarkets, which reports on micro- and nanotechnology, predict plastic electronics will be worth nearly $35 billion by 2014. That's about the same value as today's global recorded-music industry. Executives rhapsodize on grocery-store displays that will advertise directly to you, based on information picked up from, say, a chip in your cell phone. Perishables like milk could be packaged with sensors layered in their cardboard to let you know whether they've always been stored at appropriate temperatures. Other products in the pipeline include plastic solar panels, low-cost memory sticks and displays like big-screen TVs that could be rolled up and stashed when guests come over.

Q: 試翻 "Perishables like milk ... at appropriate temperatures."