SEMICON West, July 14-16 in San Francisco

With more sophisticated printed electronics starting to move into production, companies leading the development of key applications, like Plastic Logic and The Paper Battery Co, and suppliers driving improvements in the infrastructure for things like flexible transparent conductive film and wide-area rapid thermal processing, will share their latest results with the broader semiconductor and display manufacturing supply chain at SEMICON West, July 14-16 in San Francisco.

 

Not much has been heard from The Paper Battery Co since its big splash when it first reported on its carbon-nanotube-based paper battery a couple of years ago. However, the company has now closed on an initial round of seed funding and targets a roll-to-roll printed supercapacitor by next year.

 

Instead of having to press together the usual electrode, electrolyte and separator layers needed for batteries and supercapacitors, and seal them in a can, the company has a process to makes them all in one nanocomposite sheet of cellulose polymer matrix, that binds together carbon nanotubes and other carbon materials for the electrodes, and also soaks up the ionic liquid electrolyte.

 

The resulting black paper-like sheets can be shaped into the skin of a device, or even wrapped in to the casing of a battery to extend its performance. Initial product target energy density is 10-20Wh/kg, for the first product targeted for next year.

 

The strategy now is to target super capacitors instead of batteries, a fast growing and well-defined market with less competition, with potentially a quicker path to market.

 

Instead of growing aligned cnts, the company is now using a structured mat of commercial tubes and other carbon materials. The materials are added by a few key proprietary "print forming technology" steps to an established R2R process flow.

 

The company is in discussions with a couple of contract manufacturer or application makers that might be able to graft the new technology into their existing processes. For less demanding applications, the devices can use lower-end cnts and less of the expensive ionic liquid electrolyte, stretching it with other materials.

 

Novacentrix is introducing what it says is a scalable solution to processing high temperature semiconductor materials on low temperature substrates like paper and plastic, with a new generation pulseforge tool. The pulseforge 3300 has 10-20 times the power of the previous production models, which are aimed at drying or sintering metallic inks.

 

Both tool groups use very high intensity strobe lamps driven by high-powered pulse electronics to nearly instantly heat a wide area of material. Unlike the limited area that can be reasonably covered by lasers or with other rapid thermal processing approaches, the large area light can simultaneously flash an area inches or feet across, for running 100+ meters per minute processing rates. These numbers are reportedly suitable for pairing with high-speed printing output, at higher throughput, with higher temperatures, and in less space than traditional ovens.

 

Key is a lamp designed to operate reliably under very high power. "It delivers so much power that regular high-intensity lamps would explode," says VP of marketing Stan Farnsworth. "We know because we burned up a bunch of them before we figured out we needed to develop our own."

 

Currently the company is doing internal development work and running semiconductor materials for customers on engineering tools in its plant in Austin, TX, but it aims to have the roll-to-roll version ready to bring to SEMICON West.

 

Cima nanotech CEO Jon Brodd reports his company is sampling its flexible transparent conductive film made with silver nanoparticles in emulsion that self align into a connected netting-like pattern upon drying, rather like irregular chicken wire. The random openings allow 80% transparency, about the same as some ITO, while the silver lines reportedly provide sheet resistance of 5 ohms/square, as good as or better than much ITO.

 

Unidym CEO Mark Tilley notes his company's flexible transparent conductive thin film based on carbon nanotubes is also sampling for customer qualification for resistive touch screen panels, and the company is working on ramping stable volume manufacturing capacity.

 

The company's double walled cnts, formulated into easy-to-use ink, have a close affinity for each other, so tend to align lengthwise in ropes instead of clumps, to form a mat with an improved ratio of conductivity to transparency.

 

To speed the progress of these printed electronics technologies out of the lab into commercial production, the flextech alliance is working with its member companies on several efforts to establish some common standards for measuring and comparing materials performance.

 

CTO Mark Hartney reports the association has just organized a new working group of players from across the display, solar, OLED lighting and other application sectors to develop some standard guidelines for measuring the performance of barrier and substrate films, so users can usefully cross compare different materials.

 

Flextech is also starting a registry for novel electronic inks, similarly promoting a common framework for reporting key parameters. In addition, it is working on establishing some baseline results for standard printing tools, evaluating them with different inks in a program at Clemson University.

 

These speakers join those from Plastic Logic, the Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing at Binghamton U, the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State U, and Evident Technologies to report on their latest developments in programs on manufacturing technology for commercial printed and flexible electronics and emerging commercial applications of nano electronics at SEMICON West July 14-16 in San Francisco.

 

See the full extreme electronics agenda on disruptive semiconductor technologies at http://www.semiconwest.org/programsandevents/extremeelectronics/000222?Parentid=5&parent=yes&linkval=Extreme%20Electronics . Register with code W9EXX for free entrance to the show and printed electronics session.