Jack Kenny04.08.09
The IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe 2009 event opened Tuesday in Dresden, Germany, with more than 760 attendees pre-registered many more registering at the door. Peter Harrop, chairman of IDTechEx, said it is significantly bigger than last year’s show, and described it as the world’s largest event on this topic to date. The event opened with keynote presentations from a range of leading end users discussing their needs from printed electronics to developments with new printed electronics products.
The opening presentation was given by Raghu Das, CEO of IDTechEx, who noted how the industry is now in fast growth mode. Several of the world’s largest consumer goods companies have set up task forces to explore use of printed electronics. He presented detailed market forecasts for the industry over the next 10 years, highlighting the importance of flexible products incorporating electrophoretic and OLED displays and printed transistors. He saw an increase in work on inorganic transistors driven by their greatly superior characteristics.
Professor Pietro Perlo of Fiat showed how printed and thin film electronics is needed on and in cars for sensors and other technologies. He particularly looked at photovoltaics, noting that even in the UK a purely solar-powered car can manage 15km per day. He forecasted that improvement will be rapid because some of the new photovoltaics are transparent, permitting the largest area of the car to be utilized and copper indium gallium diselenide becoming the most cost effective option by 2012, when 50 percent of photovoltaic production will be thin film. He described a rear light module that incorporates RFID, photovoltaics and LEDs. He foresaw printing entirely all components including batteries on top of each other, reel-to-reel, to make one lighting cluster and the same approach being used for other vehicle modules. He said Europe has recently committed over €2 billion on electric vehicles, more than in the USA.
Paul Beecher of Nokia concentrated on nanotechnology. Stretchable, thin, transparent, conformal devices are the priority, and the Morph phone exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art was one result. This will be on sale by “about the middle of the next decade.” One useful new component being investigated is the combined battery and capacitor sometimes called a supercabattery. This can extend talk time and reduce associated circuitry such as capacitors and AC-DC conversion circuits and it can involve nanotubes. Zinc oxide nanowires for tactile and flexural sensor arrays are being developed as well.
Konrad Herre of Plastic Logic described his new factory in Dresden for next generation e-books, which will be flexible and driven by organic transistor arrays which match amorphous silicon performance but are tightly rollable. About 500,000 Amazon Kindle e-readers were sold in 2008, its first full year of trading, and more than 300,000 Sony e-Readers. These are small and rigid products, but the trend is now to A4 for convenience and downloading of business document without modification, he said. Color, video and large area graphics will follow. Plastic Logic will conduct trials later this year; sales will commence in 2010, with ramp up to 1 million units yearly.
John Bacon of NASA described the massive problems with current foldable photovoltaics on spacecraft and the need for unrollable photovoltaics using printing, as long as they are protected against the massively oxidizing environment in near-earth orbit. NASA also needs the lighter weight and fault tolerance of printed electronics for general use. However, because of funding constraints, newer technologies will need to wait for distant space missions because the moon program is tasked with using existing proven technologies.
Matthew Timm of Soligie described how coin cells cost only 1.1 cent, and some displays are about 12 cents per square inch, so printed electronics alternatives cannot compete on price in the near future and must compete on power (low), form (e.g., thin, flexible, frangible) and function. He described a plethora of actual and potential applications which meet these criteria. Soligie deposits functional materials onto flexible substrates using additive processes. Current examples including Blue Spark printed batteries; ACREO printed transistors, displays, etc; Toumaz body area networks and thin film technology printed memory.
Amir Mashkoori of Kovio gave the latest progress with his printed nanosilicon transistors, which have the highest performance and will be generally available in 2010. Sampling has already begun, and a target is to replace trillions of bar codes, something the silicon chip can never do. This is claimed to be the world’s first all-printed transistor and it has far better environmental credentials than the silicon chip it will replace in RFID. It uses 4 percent of the materials and far less energy in manufacture, and he sees it being used where silicon chips are overkill. For the world’s favorite RFID specification, ISO 14443, initially it offers 128 bits for only 5 cents, with 3 cents planned for later. Basically, Kovio will build intelligence into everyday things with tags read by mobile phones being particularly promising. Partners include Panasonic, Cubic Corporation and Toppan Forms.
The opening presentation was given by Raghu Das, CEO of IDTechEx, who noted how the industry is now in fast growth mode. Several of the world’s largest consumer goods companies have set up task forces to explore use of printed electronics. He presented detailed market forecasts for the industry over the next 10 years, highlighting the importance of flexible products incorporating electrophoretic and OLED displays and printed transistors. He saw an increase in work on inorganic transistors driven by their greatly superior characteristics.
Professor Pietro Perlo of Fiat showed how printed and thin film electronics is needed on and in cars for sensors and other technologies. He particularly looked at photovoltaics, noting that even in the UK a purely solar-powered car can manage 15km per day. He forecasted that improvement will be rapid because some of the new photovoltaics are transparent, permitting the largest area of the car to be utilized and copper indium gallium diselenide becoming the most cost effective option by 2012, when 50 percent of photovoltaic production will be thin film. He described a rear light module that incorporates RFID, photovoltaics and LEDs. He foresaw printing entirely all components including batteries on top of each other, reel-to-reel, to make one lighting cluster and the same approach being used for other vehicle modules. He said Europe has recently committed over €2 billion on electric vehicles, more than in the USA.
Paul Beecher of Nokia concentrated on nanotechnology. Stretchable, thin, transparent, conformal devices are the priority, and the Morph phone exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art was one result. This will be on sale by “about the middle of the next decade.” One useful new component being investigated is the combined battery and capacitor sometimes called a supercabattery. This can extend talk time and reduce associated circuitry such as capacitors and AC-DC conversion circuits and it can involve nanotubes. Zinc oxide nanowires for tactile and flexural sensor arrays are being developed as well.
Konrad Herre of Plastic Logic described his new factory in Dresden for next generation e-books, which will be flexible and driven by organic transistor arrays which match amorphous silicon performance but are tightly rollable. About 500,000 Amazon Kindle e-readers were sold in 2008, its first full year of trading, and more than 300,000 Sony e-Readers. These are small and rigid products, but the trend is now to A4 for convenience and downloading of business document without modification, he said. Color, video and large area graphics will follow. Plastic Logic will conduct trials later this year; sales will commence in 2010, with ramp up to 1 million units yearly.
John Bacon of NASA described the massive problems with current foldable photovoltaics on spacecraft and the need for unrollable photovoltaics using printing, as long as they are protected against the massively oxidizing environment in near-earth orbit. NASA also needs the lighter weight and fault tolerance of printed electronics for general use. However, because of funding constraints, newer technologies will need to wait for distant space missions because the moon program is tasked with using existing proven technologies.
Matthew Timm of Soligie described how coin cells cost only 1.1 cent, and some displays are about 12 cents per square inch, so printed electronics alternatives cannot compete on price in the near future and must compete on power (low), form (e.g., thin, flexible, frangible) and function. He described a plethora of actual and potential applications which meet these criteria. Soligie deposits functional materials onto flexible substrates using additive processes. Current examples including Blue Spark printed batteries; ACREO printed transistors, displays, etc; Toumaz body area networks and thin film technology printed memory.
Amir Mashkoori of Kovio gave the latest progress with his printed nanosilicon transistors, which have the highest performance and will be generally available in 2010. Sampling has already begun, and a target is to replace trillions of bar codes, something the silicon chip can never do. This is claimed to be the world’s first all-printed transistor and it has far better environmental credentials than the silicon chip it will replace in RFID. It uses 4 percent of the materials and far less energy in manufacture, and he sees it being used where silicon chips are overkill. For the world’s favorite RFID specification, ISO 14443, initially it offers 128 bits for only 5 cents, with 3 cents planned for later. Basically, Kovio will build intelligence into everyday things with tags read by mobile phones being particularly promising. Partners include Panasonic, Cubic Corporation and Toppan Forms.
