Sensors

Corinne Duffie from Solvay Specialty Polymers showing piezoelectric materials for sensors and actuators at Printed Electronics Europe.

PMD are a motor company based in London UK. They design, manufacture (via contractors), test and advise on motor applications, around ERM motors and LRAs.

General Vibration are a small firm that hold design patents around a new type of motor for haptic feedback. Their Gemini drive involves dual motors, which are controlled in a way that allows shorter rise times than normal ERM motors.

Infinite Corridor Technology (ICT) was set up in 2009 as an MIT spin-off. Its technology enables the creation of flexible and stretchable PBCs. Its initial target market was wearable devices that can be twisted and flexed. Its technology uses standard PBC technology on copper-clad Kapton and does not require any inherently flexible technology such as special plastic substrates or printed conductive inks.

RFMicron designs and develops low-cost, wireless, battery-free sensors. The company offers both end-to-end solutions and stand-alone sensor monitoring products.

Infratab is a privately held company founded in 2002 and headquartered in Oxnard, CA, USA, with offices in Bangalore, India and Dublin, Ireland. The company makes and sells semi-active RFID sensors and software based on Infratab Freshtime technology platform which simply and securely monitors, tracks, traces and communicates a perishable's condition throughout the supply chain.

Quad Industries are a small electronics contract manufacturer based in Europe. They have completed a variety of projects around the printed electronics space, including manufacturing NXP/Enfucell's temperature sensor logger, integrating Aito's haptic touch technology and printing onto textiles for an insole pressure sensor application.

CSEM are a not-for-profit research organisation based in Switzerland. They are a public-private partnership company, receiving Swiss government funding, and also having all of the major Swiss watchmakers (Swatch, Rolex, etc.) as shareholders. They have been working in wearable sensor technology for 20 years.

Immersion are aleading company in the haptics space, holding over 1900 patents and spanning over 22 years of experience. This profile release represents a broad update including latest news and financials from FY2015 and early 2016.

Pulse Electronics provides electronic component design and manufacturing. It offers a catalog of products as well as custom capabilities, supplying electronic components to OEMs, contract manufacturers and consumer electronic manufacturers. The company is now private but was formerly listed on the NYSE. It has annual sales of approximately $400 million. The company makes about 5% of all the antennas made for smart phones, routers and other consumer electronics wireless equipment. This activity was gained through acquisition including parts of Nokia's antenna business. It has now developed equipment, known as "fluidANT" that can print antennas on 3D substrate

Ultrahaptics are a UK startup developing projected ultrasonic haptic actuators. Their solution enables touchless haptic feedback, using arrays of ultrasonic speakers to generate sound wave fields that can be felt by the user.

Toppan Printing is a large Japanese printing company founded over a century ago. It has 1.5 trillion Japanese yen sales and employs 15,000 persons globally. The company has developed an alternative to ITO as a transparent conductive film (TCF) - it uses copper mesh, which it says is suitable for screen sizes ranging from 15" to 55". This has a sheet resistance of 0.01Ohms/square.

The Platform Technology & Science division of GSK is a group of around 3000 people that provides technology innovation support to the three main sections of GSK: consumer, pharmaceutical and vaccines. Within the PTS, the Innovation PTS division (iPTS) is a group of 25-30 staff looking for novel science to support the main divisions. Luis said that the majority of work they do is purely investigational, and only select projects will ever see application in other parts of the company.

Printed, organic and flexible electronics is an industry that includes various components and technologies, from relatively simple electrochemical sensors to flexible X-ray detectors. From an end-user's point of view, the main advantages are disposability, large area, and conformability. In this article we focus on healthcare and review the wide range of devices targeted for medical applications.

Carre Technologies Ltd (known increasingly by their product-line name, Hexoskin) are a Canadian company that make a sports shirt containing biometric sensors.

Heat or cold can lower the efficiency of a drug. A new all-printed, hybrid temperature sensor can be the solution for monitoring drugs in field in a near future.

UICO make touch technology solutions, around durable pro-cap solutions for water/dirt/glove readability. They formed in 2007, based in Chicago, and are now expanding their operations at a second site in Silicon valley.

Joanneum Research is a technology provider for business and industrial clients. They are made up of six research divisions which product IP which they can then license out to customers.

Alta Device is working on thin film GaAs solar cells. The company was founded in 2008 by professors Harry Atwater from Cal Tech and Eli Yablonovitch from Berkeley. In August of 2014, Alta Devices was acquired by Hanergy Holdings, Inc.