fantastic plastic

PolyIC, BASF, Evonik Industries, Elantas Beck and Siemens have announced the launch of a new German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)-sponsored alliance project called MaDriX to advance the development of high-performance printable Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. […]

PolyIC leads the consortium engaged in the three-year joint project. The total investment sum amounts to some €15 million, with the BMBF contributing approximately €8 million. The project is funded as part of the BMBF’s 5th Framework Program “Key Technologies – Research for Innovations, Communications Technology Sector.” The German Aerospace Center, DLR, is acting as project sponsor. With MaDriX, the companies involved in the alliance and the federal ministry will secure Germany’s current leadership as a research base in the printable electronics sector. […]

The close cooperation between the companies involved is a key to the success of the MaDriX project. PolyIC engages with the issues of component characterization, process development and setting up demonstrators. BASF, Evonik Industries and Elantas Beck will supply new materials to produce semiconductors and insulators for use in electronic circuits. Siemens is developing new real-time visual print inspection processes for quality control in the printing process. A number of universities and research institutes are also involved in the MaDriX project.

CNET News is reporting on the world’s first truly flexible OLED display fabricated by Sony.

The 2.5-inch prototype display supports 16.8 million colors at a 120 x 160 pixel resolution (80 ppi, .318-mm pixel pitch), is 0.3 mm thick and weighs 1.5 grams without the driver.

The prototype, as well as technical details were presented at the SID conferernce. Apparently the display is driven by pentacene TFTs with a mobility of 0.1 cm2/Vs.

Each subpixel (red, green or blue)is driven by a two-transistor, one-capacitor PMOS voltage programming circuit. The display operates at a frame rate of 60 Hz with a signal voltage of 12 V.

Sony uses a top-emission structure for its OLED displays, meaning they have driving transistors on the bottom and emit light from a top OLED layer. […] The structure reportedly allowed the engineers to fabricate the electrodes before fabricating the organic TFT layer, without damaging the semiconductor layer.

The latter is achieved by depositing the pentacene on a patterned, negatively-sloped layer acting as a “built-in shadow mask”.

ORFID Corporation […] has signed an agreement with BASF Future Business GmbH (BFB), a subsidiary of BASF Aktiengesellschaft, to collaborate on the development and commercialization of printable organic electronic devices for use in display backplanes, RFID tags and other next generation electronic products.
Under the agreement, BFB will provide organic materials, materials expertise and financial resources for the development and commercialization of printable electronics. ORFID will build certain organic devices and develop processes for printing and testing the devices.

ORFID’s technology is based on research by Prof. Yang Yang’s group at UCLA: using a Vertical Organic Field Effect Transistor (VOFET) structure allows ORFID to fabricate TFTs with very short channel lengths (and thus high on-currents), without the need for high-resolution patterning methods.

ORFID has developed a breakthrough in organic electronics, called the VOFET (Vertical Organic Field Effect Transistor). Due to its unique architecture and use of conductive polymers (plastics that conduct electricity) in its fabrication, the VOFET offers performance characteristics similar to conventional, wafer-based silicon transistors, but can be produced at significantly lower cost, while offering other important advantages. Using organic materials, the VOFET can be manufactured using low-cost printing techniques. ORFID’s goal, and that of electronics manufacturers around the world, is to enable the production of a new generation of ultra-thin, light-weight and flexible electronic products, such as displays and “smart packaging” that incorporates printed RFID tags.

[press release]

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.

According to a press release

Plastic Logic […] has entered into a Joint Development Agreement with NTT DoCoMo, the leading mobile communications operator in Japan, to develop flexible active-matrix displays for future mobile device applications.

Orgatronics in Eindhoven (NL) is a joint venture of TNO, OTB Group, and the Dutch Polymer Institute (DPI). A key part of their facilities is the Orgatron,

an advanced research and development line based on OTB’s inline production system allowing easy transfer from R&D to full production of Organic electronics and OLED’s. The Orgaton uses advanced inkjet printing, vacuum deposition and thin film encapsulation processes. The Orgatron is able to handle substrates up to 14” square […].

See the pdf brochure or opening day speech for more infos.

The Holst centre, an independent research center set up by IMEC and TNO,

will develop future generations of wireless autonomous transducer solutions and systems-in-foil. […] Philips, a leading player in the field of polymer electronics and microsystems, has committed to become the first industrial partner.

The centre, to be located at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven (NL),

will start with two strategic program initiatives. IMEC will lead the wireless autonomous transducer solutions initiative. The system-in-foil research and development initiative will be managed by TNO. The synergy between both initiatives will be fully utilized by the creation of joint strategic R&D activities. […]
Within the Holst Centre, IMEC will expand its current research for wireless autonomous microsystems with focus on ultra-low-power radio; ultra-low-power signal processing; micro-power generation, storage and management; sensor and actuator technology. […]
TNO […] has built expertise around the industrialization of microsystems and polymer electronics, which it will contribute to the Holst Centre. In the Holst Centre, capabilities in the fields of printing of polymers, large-area deposition and structuring of thin layers and design of device architectures will be further developed. The Centre will use these capabilities to create and demonstrate ‘sensing and acting surfaces’, large-area, thin-layered products such as organic lighting and signage, sensor tags and organic electronics.