The annual printed electronics award winners were announced on April 5th at the IDTechEx awards dinner on the Riverdream boat cruising down the river Rhine in Düsseldorf, Germany.
The awards recognize outstanding progress in the development and commercialization of printed electronics, an industry that produces a huge amount of technical innovation which will be used in many products.
The entries were judged by an eminent panel comprising of;
- Professor Iain McCulloch, Imperial College London
- Professor Günter Huebner, Hochschule der Medien Stuttgart
- Professor Elvira Fortunato, Uni of Lisbon Faculdade de Ciencias e Tecnologia
- Professor Edgar Doersam, Director, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt
- Dr Peter Harrop, Chairman, IDTechEx
The award ceremony is part of the IDTechEx event Printed Electronics Europe 2011 - which was attended by over 970 people from 37 countries - Europe's largest event on the topic.
In summary, the winners for each category are as follows:
- Best Technical Development Materials Award - MIT
- Best Technical Development Manufacturing Award - Coatema
- Academic R&D Award - Joanneum Research
- Best Product Development Award - Printechnologics
- Best Commercialization Award - Blue Spark
- Best in Show Booth Award - Printechnologics
- Best in Show Poster Award - University of Ljubljana
Best technical development materials award - MIT
MIT won this award for their work on paper photovoltaics. Large-area photovoltaic (PV) arrays are vapor-printed directly on ubiquitous paper surfaces (~0.001 g cm-2, 50V and power common electronic displays in ambient indoor lighting, even after tortuous flexing and folding. Key to this breakthrough performance is the integration of conformal, transparent and ITO-free anodes onto paper by oxidative chemical vapor deposition (oCVD).
rafts the polymer device layer to the substrate.
By avoiding heat and solvents, the MIT polymer vapour printing invention has enabled organic solar cell manufacture on entirely new classes of substrates including tissue, tracing, and wax papers; newsprint; textiles; and even plastic food wrap.
Best technical development manufacturing award -Coatema
Coatema has developed the Click & Coat concept for more flexibility regarding scale-up and integration of (new) processes, enlargement or replacement of existing components through process or business developments.
The Click & Coat concept is based on Coatema´s modular coating head expertise but allows changes of the whole pilot line configuration. Meanwhile more than 36 different modules are available e.g. different modules for winding, coating, printing, drying, sintering, UV, etc. Modules can be connected or even disassembled very easily to meet the most demanding performance requirements.
Source: Coatema
Academic R&D award - Joanneum Research
Joanneum Research has demonstrated the low-cost printing of a smart active-matrix sensor array which only uses five functional inks. The result is an all-printed flexible multi-component input device, which can be controlled by hand and finger motion.
