March 13, 2007 – NanoIdent Technologies AG, which prints semiconductor-based optoelectronic sensors, has reportedly opened the world’s first manufacturing facility for the delivery of printed semiconductor-based optoelectronics. The NanoIdent Organic Fab (OFAB) GmbH, located in Linz, Austria, supports high-volume production and will use the company’s Semiconductor 2.0 Platform to deliver printed semiconductor-based products for the NanoIdent Group of companies, which includes NanoIdent Technologies AG, NanoIdent Biometrics GmbH, NanoIdent Biometrics SAS, and BioIdent Technologies Inc.

With its environmentally friendly production process, the OFAB can produce printed electronic devices quickly and at a fraction of the cost of a traditional silicon-based semiconductor fab, the company says.

With the Semiconductor 2.0 Platform technology and OFAB production facility, NanoIdent is enabling new, innovative devices in a wide range of markets — including consumer, industrial, life sciences, and security — that were previously cost-prohibitive or simply not able to be created due to the physical constraints of silicon. Expensive masks, wasted material, and dangerous acids used for etching are not needed with printed electronics. Toxic materials are not used in the OFAB, making it a green production process.

NanoIdent’s OFAB is fitted with a Class 100 cleanroom (less than 100 half-micron particles per cubic foot). To produce printed electronics at the OFAB, nanomaterials are deposited onto a substrate using advanced printing methods. The process is extremely fast. For example, traditional chip manufacturing takes approximately two to three months. In the OFAB, the entire process can be completed in hours or days, depending on the application. Prototypes and volume production can be run on the same equipment, which allows for highly customized devices. Production capacity can easily be scaled as needed by adding more equipment.