Printed, Flexible and Organic Electronics

This week more than 250 people attended the second annual IDTechEx event on Energy Harvesting and Wireless Sensor Networks & Real Time Locating Systems. These two events are co-located given the overlap in topic and attendees were delighted with the breadth of subjects that were covered. The exhibition had trebled from last year to 20 exhibitors.

Yet it is only a first step to small devices communicating without human involvement and without those radio masts and their expensive and vulnerable cabling. Remember that...

IDTechEx Printed Electronics Europe award winners

The burgeoning electric vehicle EV industry cannot be understood by simply looking at cars. The complete market value is, and will remain, about double the market for cars. The leaders such as Toyota, Honda and Nissan make electric vehicles for many applicational sectors.

IDTechEx projects that the market for passive RFID tags will grow to over $10 billion in sales by 2019. Much of it will continue to use silicon chips. Dr Peter Harrop forecasts the Printed RFID market for 2010.

As we enter the New Year IDTechEx look back and summarises some of the main global trends in 2009 and gives some predictions, and indeed areas of opportunity, for the New Year.

IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA Award Winners Announced This week the IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA event opened to more than 900 attendees from 28 countries - by far the World's largest event on the topic. Held in San Jose, CA, the event featured more end users than ever before and grew by almost 25% compared to the same event in 2008. The event featured the annual IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA Awards ceremony, aimed to recognize outstanding achievement.

Electronics and electrics are becoming ubiquitous, the devices appearing on and in higher and higher volume products including e-labels and e-packaging. This calls for different forms of battery, capacitor and other energy storage because priorities such as environmental credentials, thinness and compatibility with energy harvesting (eg. solar cells) come to the fore alongside life and cost.

The first day of the conference (attended by more than 290 attendees) was focused on presentations from end users of energy harvesting and wireless sensor networks technologies, with the first presentation given by IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das, giving an overview of needs for energy harvesting as well as the three generations of technologies (active RFID, RTLS and mesh & WSN) that have evolved into the current market for Wireless Sensor Networks, a market due to reach US$1.75 Billion by 2019.

This week the IDTechEx events Energy Harvesting & Storage and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) & RTLS took place in Denver, CO, USA. The event was attended by more than 290 attendees, with a brilliantly diverse spread of those through the value chain - from component suppliers to solution providers to many end users from different industries.