Dr Peter Harrop, Chairman of IDTechEx met Mineyuki Arikawa, President of Japanese start up Frontier Carbon Corporation in the opulent Institute of Directors, Pall Mall, London on the evening of Thursday 20.11.08.
Mr Arikawa spoke at the recent IDTechEx conference Printed Electronics Asia in Tokyo and attracted much interest. He is now researching electronic opportunities for his fullerine (C60 etc buckyball carbon) in Europe, notably in organic photovoltaics OPV.
He is particularly interested in OPV acceptor materials where he says 75% of the research in Japan is on PCBM - the fullerene derivative 6,6-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester first synthesized by Fred Wudl in the University of California Santa Barbara UCSB, which is very reproducible. However, 25% of the research in Japan on OPV acceptor materials now focuses on using pure fullerenes despite these being solid -not solvent based like PCBM.
He says pure fullerene acceptor layers can be better electrically and they can now be deposited in layers of high integrity. Indeed, he thinks 0.6 meter wide web production of fullerene acceptor layers for OPV is conceivable employing vapor deposition. Nowadays, Frontier Carbon employs "nearly 20 people" and expects profit in 2010. It sells fullerine and fullerine derivatives, such as those with extensive OH or O-CH3 links for everything from very expensive cosmetics (suppresses free radicals) to golf balls and $3000 tennis racquets which are stronger and lighter when carbon reinforced plastic or titanium metal have the fullerene added.
He also targets capacitors, fuel cell membranes, lithium batteries, organic fied effect transistors FETs and industrial materials. In some applications a mixture of C60, C70 and other molecules is used and in others a specific molecule is synthesised and used.
Electron beam photoresist containing fullerine is more temperature tolerant in the manufacture of silicon integrated circuits, this leading to smaller feature sizes, he says.
For more attend Printed Electronics USA 2008 and Printed Electronics Europe 2009.
