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Blogs
New Displays Bask in the Sunlight
Mar 8, 2010
By Ross Rubin, Executive Director, Industry Analysis, The NPD Group
At the DisplaySearch USFPD conference, the sun-drenched beachfront of San Diego was an appropriate setting for my panel that included representatives from two companies working on energy-efficient displays that excel at outdoor readability.
Sri Peruvemba, VP of Marketing at E Ink, cited the accuracy of DisplaySearch forecasts for [...]
Seen that?
Hybrid DNA nanotubes fight cancer - Mar 7, 2010
Hybrid DNA nanotubes fight cancer Nanotechbuzz At the nanoscale, the boundary between the natural and artificial often blurs, leading to hybrid materials that cross the border between living and non-living substances. And while these hybrid biomaterials may play the villains in ...
Rugged Red Wings Make Us Want to Re-Boot
Mar 4, 2010
Red Wing's Beckman Boots will make you sound off like you got a pair ... of real tough footwear.
Earthquake in Taiwan Impacts TFT-LCD Supply Chain
Mar 4, 2010
By Shawn Lee - Analyst, DisplaySearch
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan at 8:14 AM local time on March 3, causing some factories to shut down temporarily. The initial impacts on TFT-LCD fabs are as follows:
All of CMO’s LCD factories are in southern Taiwan (mostly in Tainan; Gen 8 is in [...]
Time for a Dose of Market Realism in "Printed Electronics"
Mar 1, 2010
Let's face it, printed electronics hasn't turned out the way we all hoped. Just a few years ago the market was talking itself into a frenzy--sharing fantasies of those majestic R2R fabs churning out organic RFID tags and display backplanes with the speed of the New York Times coming off the presses. Seems rather silly in retrospect.
The dirty little secret here is that technology revolutions always begin with more hype than substance and in the absence of market reality. During such giddy periods, forecasted growth rates that are anything less than high double digits are usually greeted with calls skepticism. So even if the entire world economy hadn't decided to take a southward trend, printed electronics was fated to get a massive dose of reality.
And that massive dose of reality is now being force-fed to the market. If one accepts the traditional thick-film business, which is more like coating than printing and isn't usually counted as printed electronics anyway, the current status of printed electronics is distinctly niche-like. Our Google Alerts for both "printed electronics" and "printable electronics" never turn up much of interest these days--a few unimpressive corporate announcements here; a few academic projects there; a lot of discussion still about how to build. Unfortunately, this meager level of activity reveals that after years of talk, there is still not a lot to be excited about when it comes to PE.
What to do? A post mortem may conclude that most advocates of printed electronics knew/know little about printing and therefore had unrealistic expectations of what could be achieved and in what timeframe. Another conclusion is that it is easy to talk about what happens in the lab or to deliver Power Point slides and industry "conferences." But delivering products that people will pay for is what really counts. Technologies need applications to propel them into the mainstream.
However, the recognition that hubris, exuberance or naiveté in varying degrees have been involved here doesn't address the issues surrounding how we achieve something approaching legitimate industry status. Post mortems tell us where we have been, not where we are going.
Where Does Technical Realism Get Us?
Another response is to argue that if a lack of realism got us into this mess, it's high time that we applied some more realistic thinking to printed electronics. This thought was expressed in a recent industry press release, which made a plea for abandoning grand visions in favor of focusing on "finding the best way of doing things."
Finding a better way of doing things points us in the direction of successes and potential successes for printed electronics. Two examples spring to mind: the use of printed nanosilver to create fine traces in miniaturized PCBs and printing nanosilicon layers on silicon substrates to produce PV cells with improved performance. And, there are certainly plenty of other examples of where printing can be used effectively in electronics, where printing's unique ability to combine patterning and deposition along with low costs is appropriate to the task.
But, technical realism of this kind can also produce some pretty disappointing answers to the vital question as to how long we have to wait before printed electronics is more than just a collection of little projects in industrial laboratories and small tactical maneuvers on production lines. When will printed electronics become an industry?
At the end of the press release referred to above, comes one answer: ten years it says. One can almost hear the writers' sighs of resignation.
In Praise of Market Realism
At NanoMarkets we see things very differently. First, we think that if we have to wait ten years for printed electronics to take off, then we are talking about an academic research program, not a commercial endeavor. This is fine, of course. But no venture capitalist or corporate investment committee is going to make a substantial investment in a technology that is a decade away from taking off. Nor will they buy a futuristic story of printed and organic electronics becoming a mega-industry in twenty years. At a time when tight credit, incipient inflation and continuing worries about the health of the global financial system are in play, long-term investment in risky technologies is a fool's game.
The other issue is that continuing to keep the conversation on the technical realism isn't enough. Market realism is what really needs to be embraced.
A Semantic Digression
One implication of this shift is that we need to stop talking about "printed electronics," and instead find a name that is suggestive of functionality, one that customers may actually buy into; that is, a title that is market oriented in the same way that printed electronics is technical.
This little semantic exercise shouldn't be too hard to do, because "printed electronics" has always meant more than just printed electronics. It has typically been taken to include organic electronics and some newer forms of thin-film electronics. As a presenter at a recent industry gathering we attended put it, "when we say organic electronics, we also include printed electronics." This really makes no sense at the purely semantic level, but those of us who have watched the evolution of printed electronics know exactly what he meant.
Nonetheless, redefining printed electronics to include a particular class (or particular classes) of materials really isn't all that helpful either. "Use the best and most appropriate materials available" is still a technical prescription; it is an example, once again, of technical realism, not of market realism. The market doesn't care what materials you use any more than what fabrication equipment you use.
Where we think market realism is pointing us is toward terminology that emphasizes flexible electronics or plastic electronics, which we take to be (more or less) the same thing. There are four good reasons for thinking of the new electronics in this way.
Market Realism and Flexible Electronics
First, "flexible" is a customer-oriented measure; it is something that customers either want or do not want in their products. No one spends (or will ever spend) much time thinking about printability or materials sets (say) when making a customer choice. You are not likely to hear, "Gee Jennifer, I was going to buy this wonderful new e-book reader, but then I realized that the backplane didn't use OTFTs and it wasn't even printed."
Secondly, there is some evidence that flexible electronics is something that customers actually want, and want now. While it is impossible to know what kinds of products will sell in advance of those products being produced and marketed, some very plausible arguments can be made for the commercial viability of flexible electronics products. A few examples: flexible displays add the possibility of consumers carrying around displays large enough to do justice to the capabilities of today's smart phones; flexible PV would be a powerful enabler of building integrated PV (BIPV), since most building products generally need to be flexible; low-cost, flexible transistors suggest a new generation of smart packaging with new levels of brand identification in an era in which brands are notoriously devalued by pirates and where packaging is generally itself flexible; and flexible OLED lighting, which provides novel ways for lighting firms to distinguish themselves in the marketplace. All of these possibilities have to do with features and functions that people might actually want, not technical achievements.
Of course, technical realism still has a role to play. Technical improvements will be required in all of the product areas listed above if they are ever to come to market successfully. We note, for example that flexible displays have proven very hard to produce in volume and that firms have died trying. But unlike a view that emphasizes mere technical realism, market realism puts marketable functionality and technical issues second.
Third, and this takes us back to the possibility of a 10-year timeframe before "printed electronics" really makes a big splash in dollar terms, one consequence of thinking of the new electronics in market realistic terms is that the focus is on getting products out there, not on technical excellence. This surely inspires shorter times to market, in and of itself. By way of example, consider the Amazon Kindle book reader, the early versions of which were a little fragile but which still managed to transform the book publishing industry. Good enough are the watchwords here.
Finally, consider the fact that our industry is looking for something to unify it. As we have seen, the "printed" moniker doesn't seem to work very well. And neither does a naming based on a particular material type. Most notably, "organic electronics" clearly leaves out much of what we need to cover in any reasonable definition of our space. However, "flexible electronics" is a term that is broader in scope and in addition its various parts and applications are melded together by key enabling technologies--flexible substrates and related encapsulation technologies.
Thermal Imaging to Aid Diabetes Research
Feb 25, 2010
© wbaiv
At the ICONN-2010 conference, Baldev Raj stated that thermal imaging can be enormously helpful in studying the implications of diabetes with regard to the healing of wounds and blood flow to outer limbs and vital organs.
"The conference is organised by SRM University, in association with Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) and Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)," according to the Times of India. "Raj, who is IGCAR director, said the research has shown encouraging results and if it passes ethical and ...
Nanotech Could Support Arab Development
Feb 25, 2010
© Desmond Kavanagh
According to a report at redOrbit, TWAS executive director Mohamed H.A. Hassan has stated that nanotechnology could be a key driver for development in the Arab region.
"Hassan made his remarks at a panel session, 'Re-emergence of Science, Technology and Education as Priorities in the Arab World,' taking place at the AAAS's annual meeting in San Diego," the article states.
"The Arab region, home to some 300 million people, faces a host of daunting development challenges," Hassan said. "Three of the most fundamental involve ensuring ...
Changing Opportunities for Transparent Conductors in the Touch-Screen Industry
Feb 25, 2010
This article is based in part on research from Touch Screens: Technologies, Materials and Markets - 2010
Touch-screen displays, a target for the ITO-alternatives business for a few years now, were singled out as a special opportunity for ITO alternatives because of their particular vulnerability to ITO's tendency to crack. Polymers and nanomaterials, which are much more flexible than ITO, have been presented as ITO alternatives that do not crack. And while most ITO alternatives currently are not as transparent or as conductive as ITO, this fact may be outweighed by the non-cracking capability of these alternatives for certain applications.
The cracking problem is most relevant in the case of analog resistive touch-screen technology in which touch is sensed by moving ITO sensors. Over time, sometimes over an unacceptably short period of time, this movement causes ITO cracking. Other types of touch-screen displays are less vulnerable to the cracking problem, but until recently virtually all touch-screen displays used analog resistive technology.
Blame it on Apple
[More]
Medical Diagnostics: An Opportunity for Printed Electronics
Feb 25, 2010
This article is based in part on research from Large-Area and Printed Sensor Markets: 2009-2016
Over the past two decades, more accurate, convenient and earlier diagnoses have become a key strategy to reduce medical costs. This trend toward improved diagnostic technology will only grow in importance in the future as the first Baby Boomers turn seventy (in 2011) and as millions of people in less-developed nations begin to utilize more Western healthcare technology as their countries grow richer. In addition, healthcare experts have come to believe that diagnoses are most effectively delivered if they are made as close to the patient as possible. A quick read of a patient's condition at his or her bedside is preferred over a test sent to a lab that may take critical hours or days to interpret.
All this implies that the market for point-of-care and home diagnostic products will expand over the next few years. In our recently published report on printed and large-area sensors, NanoMarkets examined how low-cost printing technologies can help diagnostics respond to the trends outlined above. The path toward this goal of printed sensors has already been forged in the area of self-testing for diabetics, where printed test strips have helped bring accurate digital diagnostics to the tens of millions of diabetics throughout the world.
[More]
Motorola Makes a Heads-Up Display for Your Helmet
Feb 16, 2010
Motorola's Golden-i is a tiny screen meant to clip onto the visor of a construction helmet, giving you the virtual equivalent of a 15-inch monitor.
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