Printed Electronics - the Large Companies Move In
Across the world, the giant chemical corporations have been rapidly strengthening their position as producers of the new materials at the heart of printed electronics, an industry set to be over $300 billion.
BASF has licensed in know-how and invested in a new producer of organic photovoltaic devices while Sumitomo Chemical, Akzo Nobel and Henkel have made acquisitions of appropriate organic and inorganic material suppliers. Merck Chemical has funded major new university research in inorganic materials for printed electronics in Germany. Kodak, Honeywell and DuPont have announced new electronic display materials with Bayer also gearing up as a supplier. In Japan the filing of appropriate patents by Matsushita, Toshiba, Nissan Chemical, Dai Nippon Printing, Canon, Mitsubishi and other large companies has been on the increase.
The IDTechEx conference Printed Electronics Asia in Tokyo on October 8-9 will reveal many new advances and initiatives by the giant corporations. For example, Dr Yasushi Kumashiro of Hitachi Chemical says, “I will give a presentation about our new ink jet materials for these electronic devices. This will include inks for insulators and resistors.”
Speaker Gil Rosenfeld, Product Manager, Printable Electronics, Industrial Imaging Solutions of the Kodak Graphic Communications Group in Canada says, “I shall describe how features as small as 10 microns can now be printed in a controlled repeatable process with the Kodak Flexcel NX Flexo technology. The Kodak SQUARESpot™ high resolution thermal laser head, can be used for a variety of printable electronics applications, including thermal transfer of color filters, energy patterning of substrates, local annealing and thermal ablation”.
The conference will also reveal many new uses for printed electronics but curiously, the global chemical industry, while leader in making it a reality, is a laggard in using the resulting devices. It needs to learn from leading users of printed and potentially printed electronics such as the pharmaceutical, entertainment, media and consumer goods industries.
They are rapidly adopting printed electronics to improve safety, security, efficiency and merchandising. It takes the form of smart packaging that records tampering and overheating and communicates via moving colour displays and sound. There are printed moving colour billboards, posters and point of sale materials and it will appear on more packaging. Soon we shall have fully printed RFID to replace many barcodes with something more versatile and reliable and - a strong interest at BP - RFID with printed sensors.
The new electronics can be transparent, tightly rollable, stretchable, fault tolerant and even edible. There are printed loudspeakers and printed solar cells that work off heat as well as light and new transparent printed batteries that will be revealed at the conference. The chemical industry should use what is resulting, from the affordable self adjusting use by date that monitors temperature history to electronically locked hazardous chemicals with secure access. Ubiquitous sensor networks will provide greater safety in chemical manufacture and more secure control of distribution and use.
Displays are a vibrant area of printed electronics despite long life flexible Organic Light Emitting Displays OLEDs slipping further into the future. For example, in what will be a truly global event, Dr Bonwon Koo of the research staff of the Display Device & Processing Laboratory of Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology(SAIT) says, “I shall reveal a thin film transistor array for use in our new active matrix paper-like display. I shall describe our programs for flexible displays and our future plans.”
Other giant corporations represented in the speaker lineup include Toppan Forms, Sony and Bridgestone from Japan and BASF of Germany, the world’s largest chemical company, is a sponsor. More will be announced soon. In addition, many of the small companies making some of the most exciting advances have big companies supporting them nowadays. For example, the giant Solvay Corporation of Belgium recently agreed to develop advanced ferroelectric inks for global leader in developing printed mega memory - Thin Film Electronics of Sweden, which will be presenting in Tokyo. E-ink will present as world leader in the commercialisation of electrophoretic inks for printed displays. Also from the USA, Kovio will describe its revolutionary printed nanosilicon transistors that greatly outperform organic transistors and even meet specifications designed for silicon chips. The main shareholders in both of these small, high drive companies are giant corporations. H.C.Starck, holding some of the key intellectual property in organic inks will present. It was formerly part of Bayer in Germany.
An exception to the big company scene is the analyst IDTechEx, from the USA and UK, that is organising the conference. It will present on the global scene in printed electronics from a strictly independent point of view as a globally recognised consultancy and publisher in the field.
Chairman Dr Peter Harrop says, “We shall be sharing our latest market forecasts and the lessons of success and failure in the rapidly evolving field. It is truly a global business. Half of it involves organic materials and half involves inorganic materials so it is important to reveal the full picture. For example, printed photovoltaics mainly employs inorganic compounds whereas most of the work on printed transistors involves organic compounds. Combinations are increasingly common and commercialisation depends on performance and price, not the interests of one particular discipline. It is interesting that suppliers such as the giant Merck Chemical of Germany are now backing both inorganic and organic materials for printed electronics.”
By Raghu Das
