Printed Electronics World

The memristor "the missing link of electronics" was finally built in 2008, using nothing more than titanium dioxide and metal electrodes in thin films. In 2009 NIST printed them on plastic film. Now a new version involving silicon and silver thin film seems to have advantages.

With a month still to go, more than 650 unique attendees from 24 countries have registered for Europe's largest show covering printed electronics and its many variants (flexible, organic and inorganic electronics). As of this week, there are 74 exhibiting companies - the World's largest exhibition on the topic.

With its 135 members all over the world, the OE-A has become a highly dynamic and constantly growing network of leading international companies and institutes in the past five years", said Wolfgang Mildner, Chairman of the OE-A and Managing Director, PolyIC GmbH & Co. KG, Germany, on the occasion of the 5th anniversary celebration of the OE-A - the industry association for organic and printed electronics - in late February at the Holst Centre in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In December 2004, 35 members founded this working group within VDMA. "One of the founding principles of the OE-A five years ago was the goal to build an international industry association to jointly develop this future multi-billion Euro market", emphasized the Chairman of the OE-A. "Cooperation all along the value chain is essential in this phase; no company can achieve it alone."

A Portuguese university has developed Paper-e®, an emergent technology for applying field effect transistors on and with paper.

Nano ePrint has already demonstrated that its nano-scale devices not only dramatically simplify manufacture, but also achieve over 10 times the performance and over 100 times the density of conventional printed electronics.

POLYIC and THINFILM announce high-volume pilot production of roll-to-roll printed memories enabling next-generation interactive toys and games

Chris Giacoponello introduced NTERA's concept of "printegration", the possibility to integrate a display, a sensor and a battery by using successive printing steps. NTERA's technology is based on viologen inks that change colour upon accepting electrical charge. Without a need for a transparent conductor, they can be directly deposited on any opaque substrate (e.g. paper, PCB) with better reflectivity and lower cost (avoiding costly ITO).Company demonstrators include RF-powered displays (co-operation with poly-IC), solar powered ones (co-operation with Plextronics) and a device comprising a printed display & battery stack, demonstrated in June 2009.

Konarka Technologies, Inc., an innovator in development and commercialization of Konarka Power Plastic®, a material that converts light to energy, today announced the company, along with Arch Aluminum & Glass Co., Inc, has launched the first curtain wall pilot project that will integrate Konarka Power Plastic into a wall structure at Arch's office building in Tamarac, Florida.

Just three weeks after G24 Innovations (G24i) successfully launched the world's first commercial application of Dye-Sensitive Solar Cells (DSSC), the global pioneer of DSSC announced that it has signed a formal agreement with three of China's most prestigious institutes to accelerate industrial development of the technology.

Raghu Das, CEO at IDTechEx reports on the Energy Harvesting Technology event which looked at the use of technologies to generate electricity from the environment which can be used to power electronics and electrics.

Scientists have developed a new form of stretchable silicon integrated circuit that can wrap around complex shapes.

IDTechEx, along with other analysts, forecast the printed electronics market. While some agree others give widely different figures. After analyzing the industry for nine years, IDTechEx has just completed a new report covering the forecasts of the industry in great detail. Here Raghu Das, CEO, summarises the findings giving that crucial detail behind our forecasts.

Kovio and Nissan Chemical have announced a joint collaboration to scale up production of Kovio's silicon ink. In addition, Nissan Chemical is now working with leading display manufacturers to explore the use of high-performance and low-cost printed silicon electronics to manufacture TFT backplanes for displays.

2008 was the year of the solar cell, 2009 is marked by the success and growth of the e-book reader market and 2010 will be the year we start to witness further OLED penetration.

Liquavista BV. has launched its latest technology platform LiquavistaColor, which offers bright full color capability and the advantages of full interactivity and hi-fidelity video at ultra-low power to future advanced eReader devices for the first time.

The traditional electronics manufacturing process is poised for a paradigm shift away from expensive photolithography toward inkjet technology. Carbon nanotubes are enabling this paradigm shift due to their high conductivity and nanoscale size. This combination enables the production of new inks that create the needed conductive paths at much smaller feature sizes than is currently possible.

Bayer MaterialScience LLC, a subsidiary of Bayer AG and part of the global Bayer MaterialScience business, has acquired Artificial Muscle, Inc. (AMI) of Sunnyvale, California. AMI is a pioneer and leader in the field of electroactive polymers for the consumer electronics industry.

Interest in Printed Electronics from major consumer brands worldwide is constantly increasing. A testimony to that is the ever-growing number of end-users presenting at the latest IDTechEx Printed Electronics conference this coming April, as well as the variety of industries they represent.

The traditional electronics manufacturing process is poised for a paradigm shift away from expensive photolithography toward inkjet technology. Carbon nanotubes are enabling this paradigm shift due to their high conductivity and nanoscale size. This combination enables the production of new inks that create the needed conductive paths at much smaller feature sizes than is currently possible.

A very interesting array of talks spread over 3 days brought together approximately 400 people interested in printed electronics and related technologies. On the opening day of the conference, Marc Bernstein from the Palo A lot research Center focused his presentation on the lessons learnt from the move from laboratory scale research to real world applications whereas John Pellegrino from the US Army research Labs, although primarily focused on "meeting the technology challenges for the soldier", highlighted efforts to accelerate the adoption of flexible electronics in the intersection of the military and commercial sectors.

Cambrios Technologies Corporation announced today that an important patent has issued covering commercially relevant methods of manufacturing metal nanostructures. U.S. Patent number 7,585,349 assigned to the University of Washington and covering an invention made by Younan Xia and Yougang Sun was licensed exclusively to Cambrios in its specific field of use.