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Canadian Researchers Debut PaperTab, the Paper-Thin Tablet
redletterdave writes "The PaperTab, which looks and feels just like a sheet of paper, may one day overtake today's tablet. Developed by researchers at the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, the PaperTab features a flexible, high-resolution 10.7-inch plastic touchscreen display built by Plastic Logic, the company borne from Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, and relies on a second-generation Intel Core i5 processor to turn what looks like a sheet of white paper into a living, interactive display. Unlike typical tablets akin to Apple's iPad, the idea of PaperTab is to use one app at a time, per PaperTab. To make tasks easier, users would own 10 or more PaperTabs at once and lay them out to their liking; with multiple tablets to separate your applications, PaperTab relies on an interface that allows you to combine and merge elements from disparate applications with intuitive dragging, dropping, pointing, and folding."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81iiGWdsJgg&feature=player_embedded
Only paper with rounded corners.
The thickness of the wafers onto which chips are etched is NOT 7 microns. The standard wafer thickness is about 775um, or just about 1mm. That doesn't count the substrate onto which the electrical connections must be soldered.
It's also extremely fragile at this thickness, and a big portion of placing it onto a ceramic or organic plastic substrate is so that it doesn't crack.
With a plain wafer, you can crack it by gently rapping it with your knuckle, or dropping it gently on a hard surface.
Thickness may not be the issue, but durability is. So is heat dissipation. A modern chip is designed to dissipate heat rapidly, among other things. There are all sort of problems beyond flexibility that plague this particular engineering problem.