Printing the Electronic Future
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)
In most of these cases we are talking about many passes of very different new inks such as fine silver conductors, ceramic dielectrics, copper doped phosphors, and both organic and inorganic semiconductors and passivation layers. Low temperature curing, better definition, thinner layers and continuity are among the challenges. However, well over ten billion such constructions, mostly on polyester film or paper, have already been sold and the potential goes all the way up to ten trillion barcodes being replaced with printed chipless RFID every year. Yes, the barcode replacements will mainly be printed directly onto things - the money will not stretch to labels in those volumes.Below is the IDTechEx projection for the global market for RFID in 2016 in billions of dollars with the impact of printing technology
- Partly printed tags for items $4.4 billion
- Fully printed tags for items $1.1billion
- Partly printed tags for other uses $3.55 billion
- Tags without printing, for other uses $1.8 billion