fantastic plastic

This article at IDTechEx talks about the decline of the traditional printing industry, and new markets in the field of printed electronics.

Are the ink makers, machinery suppliers and others variously specialising in flexo, litho, ink jet, screen, gravure and other technologies looking like the steam engine experts of one hundred years ago? The answer is probably not. Certainly there is a fascinating escape route opening up for some. It is the printing of electronics.

Apart from cost savings, printing electronics enables the fabrication of new (flexible) devices and easier integration of components (e.g. displays, batteries, antennas, resistors, …).

Printed electronics will kick the silicon chip out of the talking gift card as well as the discrete components and wires to which it is attached. But that is the least of what it will do. The film Minority Report showed it giving us the moving colour display and voice over on the cornflake packet. Interactive games on disposable paper packaging have already been demonstrated in real life but more serious uses will also drive printed electronics forward.

The following table lists some of the companies involved in the printing of functional devices (Source IDTechEx)

According to a report by Displaybank

Overall OLED shipments reached more than 61 million units for the year 2005, and revenues hit almost US$600 million, according to Displaybank (CEO Kwon Sang-Sei), a market research firm.

The clear leaders in 2005 were Taiwan (27 million units) and Korea (22 million units), followed by Japan (8 million units).

Kyosemi Corporation is developing solar cells consisting of 1mm spheres on a flexible substrate.
More information on the Sphelar solar cells: production process, main features, overview (PDF):

In mid-2006, Kyosemi Corp. plans to begin full-scale mass production of its Sphelar spherical micro solar cell at its Eniwa Operation in Eniwa City, Hokkaido, Japan.
While existing planar solar cells can take light only from their elevation surface, the Sphelar cell allows light to reach its cells from all directions because it has a spherical surface, providing a high level of photoelectric conversion efficiency. […]
The company uses conditions of microgravity to form the Sphelar cells from molten silicon. Surface tension causes the silicon to take on a nearly perfect spherical shape. Due to segregation effects gained during the solidification process, single crystal silicon with a purity of 99.9999 percent can be obtained. The pn junctions are created using an n-plus diffusion process. Silver paste is used to attach electrodes. The product is finished with a coat of reflection film. […]
If a Sphelar cell is encapsulated in acrylic resin, it can be turned into Flexible Sphelar sheet, a thin solar cell module whose shape can flexibly be changed into, say, a crescent or a curved form.
A module made with a series of Sphelar cells connected in parallel on silicone resin achieves a photo electric conversion efficiency of 19 percent.

See also this earlier article (”Spherical Solar Cells Solve Issue of 3-D Sunlight Reception”, 2003).

BusinessWeek has a story on electronic ink applications, such as Hitachi’s electronic paper advertisement displays, updated via wireless connection.
They remind us of the fact that modern information technoloy has not led to the once envisioned paper-free office.

But the fact is, paper hasn’t gone away. The spread of the Internet and the rise of the PC have made information ever more accessible, leading not to the death of paper but to its proliferation. In 2004, worldwide paper production was roughly 400 million tons, compared with about 300 million in 1995, according to Japan Pulp & Paper statistics.

It remains to be seen whether or how soon e-paper will replace real paper. Applications such as rewritable shop price tags and billboards, where e-paper can provide added functionality, compared with traditional paper,

could help the market for e-paper surge to nearly $900 million by 2011, from $2 million last year, according to Tokyo-based market watcher Techno System Research.

The article goes on to mention colour electronic paper and printable OLEDs.
It’s cleary a business article, so we can forgive them for confusing some of the technical details:

Despite their differences, LCDs and OLEDs share two important traits: They can quickly change what they display and don’t need a backlight, so the only time they use power is when text or images change.

Of course LCDs and OLEDs are fast compared to most e-paper types, but, unlike bistable e-paper, constantly require power. Also, most LCDs do need a backlight (or frontlight), at least for low-light situations.

Epaper.org.uk is reporting that Plastic Logic and iRex (both are developers of electronic ink e-book reader technology) are joining the IFRA eNews initiative.

One of the world’s leading organisation for newspaper and media publishing, Ifra, is joining forces with more than 20 of the world’s leading publishing houses and a group of four leading technology developers in the area of mobile e-reading, including e-paper display developer Plastic Logic, and e-reader develper iRex Technologies, in a unique three-year initiative.

LG.Philips LCD, one of the world’s leading TFT-LCD manufacturers, announced today that it has entered an evaluation agreement for active matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) development with Eastman Kodak Company. Under the terms of the agreement, LG.Philips LCD and Kodak will jointly evaluate display technologies for mobile displays and consider other opportunities, including the development and supply of AMOLED technology and products.
Budiman Sastra, executive vice president and CTO of LG.Philips LCD, said, “This agreement brings together our leadership in TFT technology with Kodak’s expertise in producing OLED materials and processing technology. Our goal is to work together seamlessly to develop future business opportunities in the AMOLED industry.”

Details here, including a bit more info on Konarka:

Founded in 2001, Konarka has steadily expanded its presence. Previous funding in Konarka—$60 million since 2001—has allowed the company to make considerable advances in its photovoltaic technology, while continuing to strengthen its intellectual property (IP) position. In 2004, Konarka acquired Siemens AG’s organic photovoltaic research activities, as well as its renowned scientific team. The Company also expanded and strengthened its European presence with the opening of a new center of operations, including research labs in Germany, and through a scale-up partnership with LEONARD KURZ GmbH & CO. KG. KURZ is a recognized leader in printing technology, with nine plant locations in Europe, the U.S. and the Pacific.

Supercapacitors or ultracapacitors use electrodes with very high surface area (e.g. porous activated carbon) and are currently used in niche application such as hybrid vehicles.
Among the advantages over electrochemical batteries are the high charge/discharge rate and stability. However, energy densities are relatively low compared to traditional batteries.

New electrode materials with increased surface area have the potential to make hypercapacitors attractive for a wider range of mobile applications.
The approach developed at MIT’s Laboratory of Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES), uses vertically-aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes.
From the MIT Technology Review:

Ultracapacitors could allow laptops and cell phones to be charged in a minute. And unlike laptop batteries, which start losing their ability to hold a charge after a year or two, they could still be going strong long after the device is obsolete. “Theoretically, there’s no process that would cause the [ultracapacitor] to need to be replaced,” says professor John Kassakian, another of the researchers.

The main hurdle the new technology is likely to face is not technical but economic. “The nanomaterials are probably a hundred or a thousand times more expensive, today, than the materials that we use,”

Other large surface area materials for ultracapacitors include carbon aerogels and barium titanate.

As reported here, the UK start-up Novalia

expects to launch its patented electronic card game by the end of 2006.
Printed electronics company Novalia is in advanced discussions with a printing company to produce the electronics on the cards. […]
Stone [Nick Stone, founder of Novalia] says that it is likely Novalia will be working with packaging companies and other end users within the next year and use the same technology on promotional packaging.
Stone is looking at various printing methods for the cards and says they could be printed using litho printing, screen printing or flexography. […]
Novalia had considered licensing out the technology but has instead decided to provide the printing company with the electronic technology. This decision will enable Novalia to work with other packaging and toy companies and provide them with the technology first hand.
Possible packaging applications could include a cereal box that could be cut up to form part of an electronic card game. […]
Stone says that the next stage of advancement will be to print the batteries, display and transistors as part of the process, although this will be some time in the future.

By using existing printing technology and focusing on simple applications, Novalia aims to keep costs low and allow the technology to progress more quickly.

NE Asia Online on the 2006 OLED Technology Report by DisplaySearch

Revenues of OLED industry is expected to total over US$500M in 2005, up 18% Y/Y, according to the 2006 OLED Technology Report from DisplaySearch. OLED display makers are in transition from passive matrix to active matrix centricity, not unlike LCDs in the early to mid 1990s. The difference is that AMOLED display makers are expected to ride the benefits of the existing TFT infrastructure created for LCDs.

Table 1 OLED Display Revenue by Application (US$ million)

Table 2 Organic Material Forecast (US$) vs Display Production

Universal Display Corporation announces a prototype full-colour flexible active-matrix OLED display at the USDC’s 5th Annual Flexible Displays & Microelectronics Conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

In the paper titled “Full Color 100 dpi AMOLED Displays on Flexible Stainless Steel Substrates,” Dr. Anna Chwang will highlight the performance characteristics of a novel flexible, full-color AMOLED display prototype that is based on the Company’s proprietary phosphorescent OLED (PHOLED™), top-emitting OLED (TOLED®) and flexible OLED (FOLED®) technologies. The full-color AMOLED prototype also uses poly-Silicon thin film transistor (TFT) backplanes designed and fabricated by PARC, a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation, and was encapsulated by Vitex Systems.

The four-inch diagonal display can portray a variety of images, including full-motion video. This advance is significant in proving the fundamental feasibility of the Company’s approach and also clearly demonstrates several key performance advantages. The display (without external drive electronics and package) is approximately 0.1 mm thick and weighs a mere 6 grams. The comparable glass-based LCD would be approximately 1.0-1.5 mm thick and weigh 20-30 grams.

GE Global Research is presenting details on its successful development of a substrate system for flexible organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) at the Flexible Displays & Microelectronics Conference, Feb. 6-9 in Phoenix, Ariz. The system features a developmental high-temperature Lexan(1) polycarbonate (PC) film from GE - Plastics combined with a transparent, ultra-high-barrier coating to help protect the OLED device against oxygen and moisture. This research, jointly funded by the U.S. Display Consortium (USDC) and GE, is designed to address the critical need for plastic substrates that can enable cost-effective, lightweight, flexible organic displays. Min Yan, GE materials scientist, will give a presentation on the new substrate system, which is currently being produced in batch mode and will ultimately be moved to a roll-to-roll process for cost efficiency. In addition, GE - Plastics is featuring a variety of plastic films for electrical/electronic display applications during the exhibition. […]
The GE system utilizes the high temperature resistance and high clarity of transparent Lexan film - properties that enable the 125-micron-thick substrate to withstand the heat involved in OLED fabrication and to allow optimal light transmission from the device. The unique graded organic/inorganic barrier coating, which is applied using plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition, meets the stringent requirements for fabricating OLEDs. The transparent coating prevents degradation of the device from oxygen, moisture, chemicals, and electrical conductivity while promoting light transmission.

(1) Lexan and LNP are trademarks of General Electric Company.

Philips has now realized the first plastic-electronics-based tag that is capable of transmitting multi-bit digital identification codes at 13.56 MHz – the dominant industry-standard radio frequency for RFID tag applications. As an additional demonstrator for the technology, scientists at Philips Research have also developed a 64-bit code generator, showing the practicality of building plastic electronic circuits with the complexity required for item-level tagging.
Performance results for these circuits will be presented at this year’s International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC, February 5-9, San Francisco, CA, USA) in a paper that will also be awarded the conference’s Beatrice Winner Award for Editorial Excellence.

The work was partly conducted in the frame of the PoliTag (funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) and PolyApply (6th European Framework Programme) projects.

Last year (July 2005) revealed a keyboard design with customisable keys using individual OLED displays. It looks like we will have to wait (at least) until the end of 2006 for this, but they are now taking pre-orders for the mini three keyboard. Same design, but only three keys.