Printed Electronics Asia: Visits to local centers of excellence, part2

Further to the company visits covered in yesterday's article , attendees to the IDTechEx Printed Electronics Asia  event in Tokyo last week had the opportunity to visit Dai Nippon Printing, Frontier Carbon Corporation and Toppan Printing.

Dai Nippon Printing is a $16 Billion company with over 30,000 customers. It was established in 1876. It provides finished packages, papers, forms, RFID solutions, LCD filters, electronic lead frames and much more. It has electronics, printing, materials expertise and strong channels to market through its existing solutions. Like other companies in Japan, Dai Nippon Printing is a significant amount of the printed electronics value chain in one company, making it a strong contender in the field of printed electronics.

 

Dai Nippon Printing revealed to the IDTechEx tour attendees its work on organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) to drive an e-paper display from Bridgestone. The OTFT backplane is printed, and a variety of printing techniques are employed including screen and inkjet printing. Dai Nippon Printing has prototyped a 10" VGA flexible display at a resolution of 80dpi.

 

The company also spoke of research work including developing self organized OFETs.

 

Attendees were shown several RFID solution systems including the company's own library which is fully automated with an RFID system. New product concepts using printed electronics were shown in the company's show room and theatre.

Frontier Carbon Corporation (FCC) is owned by Mitsubishi Chemical and Mitsubishi Corporation. It has refined a process to make fullerene - at a bulk level cheaper than previously possible.

 

It has increased its fullerene production capacity to many tens of tons per year and initially sold fullerene at a price 1/10th of that of the existing market and has further plans to decrease its price. FCC said that electronics is emerging as the biggest single application of fullerenes.

Toppan Printing is another $16 Billion company with 11,000 employees. The company is involved in finished products including packages, brochures, RFID, LCD display filters and much more.

 

Toppan Printing is working on many facits of printed electronics. At the tour, researchers presented their work on organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) as a backplane for electrophoretic displays. They are wholly printing these and are developing the printing technology, aiming to achieve very high resolution circuits, at high throughput - the holy grail of printing electronics. The speaker covered the limitations of other forms of printing in terms of resolution, such as screen printing only going to 20 microns, inkjet only to 5 microns and with low throughput.

 

Toppan Printing told the attendees about some of their new work. They showed remarkable printed features with line widths of a few microns using a printing process they have developed. They said throughput is comparable to other forms of conventional printing, and is done in air.

 

They have collaborated with Sony and demonstrated all printed OTFT backplanes for a 10.5" e-paper display. In that case, the line width was 8 micron features, using TIPS-pentacene. The speaker said that distortion of the flexible substrate is their biggest challenge.

 

Attendees also learnt about the many RFID applications Toppan Printing has been involved with, and they toured Toppan Printing's show room, museum of printing and met key resarchers.

 

IDTechEx has known these companies for many years and they have opened their doors of their premises to our attendees. Don't miss tours to other companies around the World alongside our events. At our Printed Electronics USA 2008  event in San Jose this December visit Kovio, FujiFilm Dimatix, University of California Berkley, Vitex, Rfidium and Artificial Muscle.