By Tom Cheyney
Small Times Contributing Editor
 Flexible large area printed semiconductor device (Photo: Nanoident) |
Mar. 13, 2007 — Nanoident has opened “the world’s first dedicated manufacturing facility for printed organic semiconductors” in Linz, Austria. In conjunction with the plant opening, the company has also launched its Semiconductor 2.0 platform, the “core technology foundation for a wide array of application-specific printed semiconductor products,” including photodetectors, biometric and chemical sensors, OLEDs, and photovoltaic cells.
The company started building its organic fab, or OFAB, in late 2005. The facility, located on Nanoident’s headquarters campus, measures 850 sq meters (9150 sq ft) and includes 250 sq meters (2700 sq ft) of Class 100 cleanroom. Equipment purchases accounted for most of the 10 million Euro spent on the OFAB, according to Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of Nanoident’s U.S. subsidiary, Bioident.
Rather than using traditional chipmaking techniques, the company employs an advanced inkjet-printing process, which can deposit specialized inks onto flexible and rigid substrates, including various polymers, glass, and silicon. The current process can print feature sizes down to the tens of microns on 30 x 30-cm-square substrates as thin as 20 microns, with film thickness of about 300 nm for a typical four-layer device, according to Bokhari.
“We work with different kinds of inks, to get different properties and sensitivities,” he explains. “We can add carbon nanotubes or other nanomaterials, mix and match to create more complex structures to make highly customized, highly specific semiconductors. You can design a new application and have it volume manufactured in a very short time, in a matter of hours or days. It opens the whole idea of just-in-time production. These things are not possible for a traditional semiconductor fab.”
With output volumes for the initial production line in the thousands of sq meters per year, the company’s goal is to hit 100,000 sq meters within a year. Ultimate capacity could reach 100,000 sq meters per hour, once OFAB transitions from sheet-fed or batch processing to roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing, says Bokhari.
“One of the beauties of printed electronics is scalability.” Although the fab has one printer line, it “could have three to four lines, and could be scalable by adding different lines or by changing the printer system. We have the flexibility to do both, depending on market demand.”
Gartner Dataquest’s Dean Freeman believes there is a “latent need in the marketplace” for “a flexible or printable detector” and that fabricating such devices is easier than “trying to build an integrated circuit on plastic.” But he does see manufacturing issues ahead for Nanoident.
“Probably the biggest is ramping from the R&D/pilot-line phase into the production phase. Pilot-line Q&A is much easier,” Freeman notes. “The biggest issue [with the transition from batch to R2R] will most likely be the drying and curing times needed before the next level can be deposited.”
The company has been working diligently on process development and yields for the past three years, says Bokhari. Yields are “very device dependent,” and are also a function of the “complexity of the whole system, not just the devices you’re printing but everything you’re printing around it, as well as the materials details—substrates, inks, the whole stack you’re building.”
“For each of the specific components—substrate, materials, specific devices—we’ve been working on all of these different combinations to get a good handle on what the yields are, and how to improve them. One of the main things about this fab will be that as we ramp up into higher production levels, then it will help us improve on yields because we will be tuning and optimizing the process.”
Bokhari says the company will deliver the products manufactured at OFAB to its internal family of subsidiaries. For example, Bioident will offer what he calls a “radically simplified” lab-on-a-chip solution: low-cost devices for mobile analyses and in-vitro diagnostics, fabricated with the company’s Semiconductor 2.0-based PhotonicLab platform for printed photodetectors.
NanoMarkets forecasts explosive growth in the overall global printable electronics market, which includes sensors, displays, signage, RFIDs, smart cards, and other products. Total sales could reach nearly $1.7 billion in 2008 and approach $21 billion in 2012, with most of the devices printed on plastic substrates, according to the industry analyst firm.