Info Exchange - Nanotechnology and Micro System Association

MUNICH, Germany — With several printed electronics product categories nearing the market, the market for the respective chemicals will quintuple over the next four years, predicts consulting firm IDTechEx (Cambridge, England).

While real-world applications of printed electronics hitherto are restricted to a few product groups such as RFID antennas, printed heaters and certain sensor types, the universe of printed electronics will soon expand to include LED displays, batteries and solar cells, the company says. This will drastically affect the demand and thus the market volume for the chemicals used to manufacture these products.

In today's products, different types of printed silver as well as other metals are used. The product groups to appear on the market over the next years will be made of a broad variety of different materials: Transparent electrodes, antistatic and RF shielding are increasingly printed in indium tin oxide (ITO), polyanilene or polythiopene, IDTechEx says. But printed batteries and LED displays will create a real surge in demand for new and exotic materials: Manganese dioxide zinc and copper indium gallium diselenide are among them.

Besides the materials, also the production method is about to change. IDTechEx reports that specially developed ink jet printing has already overtaken screen printing as the favored manufacturing technology for printed electronics.