Plastic Logic (Cambridge / UK; www.plasticlogic.com) has secured USD 100m (GBP 50.6m) of venture capital funding to build the world´s first commercial facility for manufacture of plastic electronics, at Dresden / Germany. Production will start in 2008. The plant will have an initial capacity of more than 1m flexible, active-matrix display modules per year for portable electronic reader devices, a product category predicted to grow to more than 40m units by 2010. Plastic Logic was spun out of Cambridge University in 2000.

With its new technology, considerably simpler than conventional amorphous silicon-based techniques, the company said it is able to make extremely thin, light and robust displays. When a display is combined with a flexible backplane, it can create a product similar to a sheet of paper. "Our displays will enable electronic reader products that are as comfortable and natural to read as paper," said chief operating officer John Mills.

Equity financing for the Dresden factory was led by Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Investment. Existing investors in the seed financing of Plastic Logic, including BASF Venture Capital (Ludwigshafen / Germany; www.basf.com) also participated in the financing of this new project, one of the largest in the history of European venture capital.