Highlights from Printed Electronics Asia 2008 - part one

238 people attended the IDTechEx Printed Electronics Asia 2008 conference and exhibition on October 8-9. Over 75% of attendees were from Japan and Korea, and they included companies such as Toppan Forms, Panasonic, Dai Nippon Printing, Sony, Samsung, Toyota, Mitsubishi Plastics, Brother Industries, Teijin, Konica Minolta, Mitsui, Toshiba and Honda to name a few.

 

The keynote speaker of the event was Mr Utaka, the Managing Director of Toppan Forms. Toppan Forms is a multi billion dollar maker of special papers and forms, and is working with technology from Kovio, Konarka, Power Paper, SiPix and others. Mr Utaka described the importance of providing a strong interface to consumers and hiding the technology so they do not see it. He showed concepts including a map at a theme park which alerted users to where they were in real time and alerted them to special events, all on a foldable sheet of paper. Toppan Forms has also commercialized the technology in products such as "audio paper" - a flexible paper based device which can record messages. It incorporates a printed battery, conductors and thin speaker.

 

Kovio CEO Amir Mashkoori spoke of their set up in their new 95,000 square foot facility in California, which includes a 22,000 square foot clean room. Using a nanosilicon inkjetted ink, mobilities of over 300 cm²/Vs have been achieved in the lab. They are able to achieve 10 micron feature sizes using inkjet printing and initially will be making RFID tags on 300 mm² stainless steel substrates. They intend to launch product imminently rather than waiting a few more years to achieve roll to roll processing.

 

Hewlett Packard discussed their development of imprint lithography on a roll to roll basis to pattern transistors for display drivers. They achieve feature sizes of 100 nm.

Polymer memory developer Thin Film Electronics of Sweden previewed a 15 bit 1 cent memory device in gaming cards, soon to be a commercial product. Higher memories were also shown which will be used in a medical application.

Several companies spoke of progress with non silicon PV technologies. Gifu University, working with Sekisui Jushi Corporation, has been developing Dye Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSC) and expect first products to appear over the next few years. The cells can be coloured depending on the dye used and applications already are red road signs where the sign is a solar cell which powers LEDs on the sign at night. Conventional PV is not suitable here because that would use glass which is dangerous on a road sign.

 

G24 innovations, also working on DSSC, say their first orders are now in hand. The company has developed roll to roll manufacture of DSSCs in Cardiff, Wales. Output is capable of achieving 20MW production. They can process 1 km of PV in 2 hours. A second line is due to be completed in mid 2009 which will add a further 25 MW. The company has also received planning permission to install a wind turbine - they intend to be operated completely from renewable energy.

 

Fang-Chun Chen from Taiwan published results of using microwave annealing on polymer solar cells, which decreases the anneal time to just 90 seconds.

 

Sony spoke of development of printed OTFT for display drivers - a 10.5" VGA fully printed backplane has been achieved. They worked with Toppan Printing on this. Issues they are working on are improving TFT deviations, getting wiring to less than 10 microns, handling flexible substrates and thermal shrinkage.

 

More highlights of the IDTechEx event will be covered in Printed Electronics World over the coming days. If you missed the event, you can purchase the presentations from www.IDTechEx.com/peASIA .