Inorganics

Organic printed electronics has attracted hundreds of participants over the years. However, the topic is as much about inorganic electronics as it is organics - organic electronics is not the end game for all printed electronics.

NovaCentrix announced today it will use Printed Electronics Europe 2009, in Dresden April 7-8, as the stage for the public launch of a significant new offering in the MetalonTM family of high-performance conductive inks: the ICI copper-based ink platform.

BASF and Vorbeck Materials Corp. have established a joint research program to develop graphene-based formulations and composite materials.

MICROOLED and CEA-LETI design the most efficient silicon-based OLED microdisplay in the world

H.C. Starck has developed an even more conductive polymer that can be tailor made for printed electronics.

DuPont Microcircuit Materials (MCM), part of DuPont Electronic Technologies, has announced the introduction of a new silver conductive ink formulated for use in printed electronics.

IDTechEx finalises its report on the Intellipak conference held on 5 November in Sweden

IDTechEx report on the Intellipak conference held in Sweden on 5 November that was mainly in Swedish and partly in English with just over 40 attending and excellent content.

Oregon researchers push printed inorganic electronics to higher levels of performance by synthesizing an elusive metal-hydroxide compound in sufficient and rapidly produced yields, potentially paving the way for improved precursor inks that could boost semiconductor capabilities for large-area applications.

The success of today's digital electronics is based on the CMOS technology.

The largest potential market for OLEDs is for mass produced, flexible, low cost versions, particularly wide area types with long life because they enable many exciting new product concepts to be realised rather than replace existing displays in familiar devices.

In Portugal, a new field effect transistor with paper interstrate layer has now been developed.

Printed electronics today is mainly a matter of inorganic rather than organic chemistry and the next ten years are unlikely to see the inorganic part drop below 50% of the high value materials required.

Schreiner Group in Germany has made a great success of ac electroluminescent lighting and displays, screen printed with inorganic compounds.

OTTI, the East-Bavarian Technology Transfer Institute, will host an experts' forum on printed electronics 3-4 March in Regensburg, Germany.

Only RFID offers the electronic printing industry the potential of ten trillion devices yearly, in this case replacing barcodes.

Inorganic semiconductor technologies with conventional patterning offer immediate solutions, according to Kodak, which offers Chemical Vapor Deposition CVD to make it happen.

Transistors are the engine of the new electronics just as the silicon chip is the engine of the traditional electronics.

Products like the flexible transistor will account for 10 percent of the information technology (IT) device market within the next 10 years say researchers at KIST.

Hosokawa Micron has expanded its range of inorganic compound nanoparticles created by its NANOCREATOR process. In electronics and electrics, the first applications targeted by Hosokawa are fuel cells but IDTechEx expects that use in thin film dielectrics for transistors and other electronic applications may come later.

The future $300 billion market for printed electronics is emerging via thin film electronics. The contribution of organic materials to this is greatly publicized but the best devices being developed usually rely on inorganic or combined inorganic/organic technology. The more select groups developing these inorganic materials and devices have a great future. IDTechEx has published the first study on Inorganic Printed and Thin Film Electronics. Here Dr Peter Harrop summarises some of the findings.

The annual IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe conference held in Cambridge in April had grown very strongly to over 330 delegates from 20 countries. The first day of the conference was opened by Dr Peter Harrop of IDTechEx, who took the pulse of the industry.