Highlights from Europe's Largest Event on Printed Electronics

By Raghu Das, CEO, IDTechEx

 

The 11th annual IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe event in Berlin was a huge success thanks to our customers and partners, with attendees coming from 47 countries! This is the largest show on the topic in Europe and, more importantly, more adopters, OEMs and technology providers announced products and showed off their impressive solutions. Some even closed deals and sold products right at the event. Perhaps the feedback from attendees and exhibitors can describe the experience best:

 

 

"Excellent event - very useful having so many different disciplines all under one roof." BAE Systems

 

"This event is really focused on real things, real devices and people are focused on concrete business." Thales

 

"Excellent - well organised, good speakers, plenty of great information." CSIR

 

"We were barely capable of coping with the overwhelming interest of top level quality contacts at our stand." Bainisha

 

"IDTechEx have done a terrific job of creating the right environment for printed electronics progress. The talks were a great mix of technologies and applications, and the exhibition attendees were there to learn, engage, and buy. We'll be back next year for certain." NovaCentrix

 

For the IDTechEx team, including myself, having been involved in all eleven of our Printed Electronics Europe events, it was a humbling experience to bring together and see so much enthusiasm in the sector with more solutions demonstrated and in particular more interest and wider attendance from end users from around the globe.

 

On an almost daily basis, IDTechEx will be releasing videos of exhibitors taken at their booth on our website Printed Electronics World so that you can learn more about what they do. The combined gross sales of the 200+ presenting organizations alone amounts to over One Trillion Euros. Here are a few of the highlights from the event.

 

As a reminder, the dates for the next event in Europe - Printed Electronics Europe 2016 - are 27-28 April 2016 at the Estrel Convention Center in Berlin - please block your calendar and ask us for early bird registration discounts, we hope to see you there.

Stein Lundby of Qualcomm was the first keynote presenter at Printed Electronics Europe. Qualcomm, which had revenues of over $26 Billion last year, announced a new product based on printed electronics.

 

 

Stein unveiled a printed electronics based sensor platform that was developed with printed battery provider Enfucell. It is label-like and features a printed battery, printed wiring and sensor and computational ICs, as pictured below.

 

The product is initially targeted to golfers - whereby the sticker can be applied to a golf club and the golf swing performance sent to a smart phone via low energy blue tooth to allow users to see valuable data about their grip, swing etc for each stroke and therefore constantly improve their game.

Watch the product video here:

 

What if you can just pick up a product in one hand and on your smart phone in your other hand, up pops information about that product? Or what if you can as easily touch objects around you to retrieve or send information, including from plants? That was the demonstration shown by Jan Hederen in his presentation, "The power of touch". This uses the capacitance in your body to complete the circuit with you, the object and the ground. Watch the demonstration here:

 

Keith Churches, Head of Innovation at Flextronics gave a wide ranging presentation about the many aspects of printed and flexible electronics they are involved in, below being just a few examples from the medical market segment:

 

 

Next year the company will also be supplying flexible electroluminescent displays in clothing for athletes at the 2016 Olympics in Brazil.

More information from the event will be covered over the coming weeks, but here are a few photo highlights from exhibitors.

 

Lead Sponsor Ceradrop showed a range of equipment on their 90sqm booth, including their machinery which inkjet prints on a 1.2 meter wide substrate, in addition to aerosol printing and 3D printed electronics:

 

Body monitoring system shown by Bainisha:

 

Sold! Gold sponsor NovaCentrix show their PulseForge 1300 equipment, sold to a client in Germany at the show:

 

Many flexible and stretchable devices were on show, including these gesture controlled flexible displays from FlexEnable, one example of some of the devices they showed:

 

Examples of more product on display:

 

Among much other progress, IDTechEx Printed Electronics Awards winner Konica Minolta discussed their OLED lighting factory in Japan capable of producing up to 1 million flexible OLED lighting panels a month, made on a roll to roll basis. Some of the lights were installed in a tulip festival in Japan.

 

One of the Judges from the independent judging panel commented on this, "The OLED tulips are perfect illustrations of the clear advantage of plastic-based organic electronics compared to competing technologies and the drive for highly flexible and eye-catching devices will undoubtedly help this industry massively."

 

And then, of course, were the many popular networking sessions, including this one at the NovaCentrix booth:

 

 

See the latest updates at the IDTechEx twitter account at www.twitter.com/idtechex. The next IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe event will be held at the Estrel in Berlin, Germany on 27-28 April 2016 and before that the US version will be held at the Printed Electronics USA event in Santa Clara, CA on 18-19 November 2015. Mark your calendars for both of these events and contact us today for early bird registrations. For more details see www.PrintedElectronicsUSA.com

IDTechEx guides your strategic business decisions through its Research and Events services, helping you profit from emerging technologies. IDTechEx Events provide an analytical, commercial outlook, taking into account market requirements, competitive technologies and development roadmaps. Attendees are presented with the full, diverse range of technologies but the main thrust is always on end user needs and commercialization strategies. For more information see www.IDTechEx.com.

Raghu Das MA (Cantab) is CEO of IDTechEx. He has a Natural Sciences degree from the University of Cambridge, where he studied physics. He has been closely involved with this subject for over fourteen years, carrying out consultancy in Europe, USA, Asia and the Middle East. He has lectured on these topics at over 300 events around the world and is author of several IDTechEx publications. r.das@idtechex.com

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