Soligie (Taylor Corp.) Progresses Co-deposition of Printed Electronics Components
IDTechEx recently visited Soligie in Minnesota. Soligie is wholly owned by Taylor Corp., a $1 Billion holding company which owns about 100 businesses focussing on niche areas of printing and media. Matt Timm, President of Soligie, and a veteran of the electronics/semiconductor industry, was exploring new opportunities for Taylor Corp. and set up Soligie in 2005.
Soligie is uniquely positioned as a design and manufacturing services provider. It has the printing and electronics capability to produce printed electronics products for companies, without them having to tool up or acquire the necessary skills at high risk. It is akin to the fab-less semiconductor business model of the silicon world. To achieve this, the company is technology agnostic. For example, Soligie works with most of the major vendors for inks - organic and inorganic. It has also partnered with companies developing device architectures, such as Thin Film Electronics of Sweden, developing polymer memory, acting as a manufacturing company for them, and others.
Soligie is not setting out to compete in the high end display business or compete with silicon RFID tags, but rather it is focussing on new products including those in the toy, medical, packaging, card and consumer goods industries, to name a few examples.
In June 2007, Soligie installed its roll-to-roll production line, which offers two types of printing techniques, inline, and the ability to print many layers inline. Soligie has customized the inline cure processes to enable high speed throughput yet excellent device performance. By early 2008, it had taken its first orders.
Timm told IDTechEx that Soligie has several fortune 500 companies as clients, and it is in the process of bringing new products based on printed electronics to market via such clients. For example, next year two printed electronics products will be used in the healthcare industry in Europe - smart packaging, and drug delivery patches. In total, Soligie will be a partner to commercializing at least four products with its proprietary manufacturing processes in 2008 with more in the pipeline. In August, Soligie received ISO 13485:2003 certification, a standard developed to provide a framework to meet medical device regulatory requirements. The company was also certified to ISO 9001:2000 standards.
Soligie is also developing new products with partners using different printing technologies too, some of which will be in a clean room, allowing the company to offer the full gambit from conductors and dielectrics to displays, transistors and batteries.
Shrewdly, Soligie is progressing the know how to co deposit different components on the same substrate, which IDTechEx feels is of great importance but under-addressed by the industry. This is as opposed to manufacturing components separately in bulk and laminating them together at another location, which offers less flexibility, potentially more cost and an increased potential for failure points. The company has developed classes of components that can be co deposited.
For more details see www.soligie.com or contact Matt Timm at matt.timm@soligie.com. Soligie anticipates making several announcements this autumn and at the IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA event.
By Raghu Das
