Printed, flexible electronics scaling up

01/01/2013

Denise Rael,

FlexTech Alliance

Excitement is building in the world of printed and flexible electronics. Recent announcements of flexible and curved displays for mobile phones, TVs and other consumer devices will push technologists to solve scale-up challenges in manufacturing, helping migrate products from prototypes to mass production.

Printed electronics are not limited to consumer goods either. The medical device market, estimated at over $300 billion, also benefits from advancements being made in printed electronics. According to Lux Research, the overall value proposition of printed, flexible and organic electronics revolves primarily around lower-cost replacements for non-printed devices, and flexible devices that will enable increased wearability.

Many materials manufacturers, capital equipment providers, and product integrators are hard at work reducing materials costs, improving device performance and increasing the reliability of printed electronic devices in an attempt to create these lower cost replacements for non-printed devices.

For example, there has been a lot of innovation in display manufacturing. E Ink is mass producing a plastic active matrix electrophoretic reflective display that has been launched for a cell phone product incorporating the best of both display worlds: a daylight readable low power EPD full display on one side and a video color LCD on the other side. LIM Liquids in Motion GmbH uses low power flexible frontplanes with full-color and bistable features that can be built based on electrowetting principles.

UCLA has developed a new transparent composite electrode technology that can match the transparency and sheet resistance of ITO. OLEDs that can be reversibly stretched by up to 50% strain, twisted, and folded have been demonstrated.

On the production front, several advancement s have been made to enable full manufacturing scale-up . Applied Materials has a variety of different web handling & coating technologies that take into account the principal challenges inherent to R2R device manufacture such as choice of substrate, thermal budget, layer stack stress, patterning, and defects. PARC has developed design rules used for lab-scale, ink-jet printed multi-layer complimentary circuits. They are currently translating these designs rules to production scale equipment. AIXTRON has commercialized the principle of organic thin film deposition utilizing an inert carrier-gas for the transport and controlled condensation of small molecules to meet the scale up challenges of high performance devices.

Material providers are also making strides to reach the low-cost promise of printed electronics. DuPont Electronics and Communications is focused on efforts to address cost-centered concerns with a new family of printed conductor materials. Brewer Science has developed a novel method for achieving stable solutions of largely pristine carbon nanotubes without the need for surfactant. Solar Press is developing robust, high throughput roll-to-roll fabrication processes and ink formulations for high performance OPV module production, including low cost production techniques for active layer materials.

The latest developments, applications, and research in printed electronics???including manufacturing technology???will be featured at the 12th annual Flexible & Printed Electronics Conference & Exhibition, to be held January 29-February 1, 2013, in Phoenix, AZ. Hosted by the FlexTech Alliance, the 2013 Flex Conference features over 95 technical papers in 18 sessions on a broad range of topics covering the latest developments in flexible and printed materials, tools, and processes (www.flexconference.org) .

Solid State Technology | Volume 56 | Issue 1 | January 2013