Market Opportunity by Printing Type in Printed Electronics
Launching 2013
Description
Printed electronics is becoming a huge business because it is often lower in cost and/ or superior in performance to conventional electronics, examples of the latter being lighter weight, robustness, fault tolerance and thinness. All that is possible thanks to the low-cost printing technologies used, namely screen, gravure, flexo, offset and inkjet printing.
Coating and printing are possible at standard environmental conditions, using equipment with tremendously high throughput - and that could finally lead to low-cost electronics, the often cited "electronics everywhere".
Direct printing is of special interest since it makes it possible to produce patterned structures without further effort. In the case of inkjet printing, the pattern is defined by the direct placement of the drops, for the conventional printing technologies, the printing form defines this pattern. The properties of the final layer are different for the different technologies: screen printing allows thicker layers with higher conductivity, while in offset, flexo and gravure printing, the potential resolution is better. Depending on the requirement from the application, the process is to be chosen.
Indeed, the initial euphoria about entirely printed electronics devices has largely evaporated in the last couple of years. However, many commercial applications involve at least one printing step. This is true for printed electroluminscent displays, organic and inorganic electrodes and transistors, thin-film photovoltaics, printed batteries, and RFID labels to name only a few.
There will be no single printing technology employed for printing electronics because the needs are so disparate. Inkjet printing has had greater support than any other printing technology for printed electronics. Huge investments have radically improved the inkjet printer to make it suitable for the task. Its advantages include lowest wastage of the inevitably expensive inks and greatest tolerance of uneven and undulating surfaces. Inkjet is particularly useful for all but the largest volumes, being extremely good for uneven and changeable surfaces where it can even be focused in real time at the micro scale.
