BUSINESS
BREAKING THROUGH Printable electronics is attracting growing interest and is gearing up for commercial applications ALEXANDER H. TULLO, C&EN NORTHEAST NEWS BUREAU
I
N THE 2 0 0 2 SCIENCE FICTION FILM
"Minority Report," the protagonist, John Anderton, is in no mood for the noisy, animated cartoon characters on the front of a cereal box, so he flings the offending package out of sight. The movie, set in 2054, also features automatically updating electronic newspapers and billboards that pitch to particular individuals in a crowd. If the future does see technologies like these, it will likely be thanks to printable electronics. By being potentially much cheaper and more physically flexible than conventional electronics, printable electronics can make electronics, already ubiquitous today, more commonplace and perhaps even disposable. Conventional silicon-based semiconductors are manufactured in clean-room environments
silicon," says Beng Ong, a research fellow at Xerox Research Centre of Canada in Mississauga, Ontario. Chemistry is playing a crucial role in making printable electronics come to life. And many chemical and materials companies—including BASF, Dow Chemical, Cabot Corp., DuPont, Degussa, Merck KGaA, and Sun Chemicals—have taken a keen interest in this nascent sector. Companies like these are developing their own technologies or investing in small start-up firms in the field. Peter Harrop, chairman of the U.K.based consultancy IDTechEx, says real-life
ON A ROLL A worker prints demonstration circuits at PolylC's headquarters in Erlangen, Germany. through costly processes like photolithography and plasma etching. Though the performance of chips manufactured this way is without peer, there is a limit to how inexpensively they can be made. Printed electronics, at least conceptually, represent a step change in production costs. Semiconductors would be based on organic inks printed on flexible plastic substrates similar to how labels and newspapers are made. But instead of words and pictures on paper, layers of semiconductor inks would be applied, building active electronic components such as transistors. "The premise is that if you are able to use solution deposition, you will be able to make this transistor on this circuit much cheaper than you would if it were
applications of printed electronics won't be as frivolous as the ones shown in "Minority Report." He says printable electronics may make conventional "use by" dates on
drug and food packaging obsolete. Instead, a bottle of pills may record the temperatures it has experienced, and an electronic display can advance or delay the expiration date accordingly. The potential of printable electronics is bounded only by the imagination. The technology might be used to make radio frequency identification (RFID) tags inexpensive enough to be printed on just about everything, helping to foil counterfeiters or enable Wal-Mart managers to keep inventories continually accurate. Tags on sweaters may someday tell washing machines how they should be washed. And window shades may someday double as photovoltaic power sources. Harrop predicts that sales of organic chips will eventually eclipse sales of silicon chips, which were nearly $230 billion last year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. He forecasts that organic electronics will be a $30 billion market by 2015, at which point major applications will be logic circuits, displays, and lighting. I The market, he predicts, will grow i to $96 billion by 2020 as uses like £ billboards and power generation emerge. By 2025, Harrop says, the organic electronics market will be about $250 billion. According to Harrop, conventional chipmakers won't have to worry about competing head-tohead with organic semiconductors for another 15 years. The initial growth will come from new-to-the-world applications that wouldn't be commercially possible without cheap, printable electronics. Some commercial applications for printable electronics are hardly futuristic. In fact, rudimentary applications such as toys that incorporate printable circuitry are already commercial, Harrop points out. More sophisticated applications, such as displays and RFID tags, may be less than two years away. Plastic Logic, launched in 2000 in Cambridge, England, is working on technologies to make applications like animated posters and electronic newspapers become a reality. The company was spun off the same
A bottle of pills may record the temperatures it has experiencedp and an electronic display can advance or delay the expiration date accordingly. WWW.CEN-0N LINE.0RG
C & E N / FEBRUARY 13. 2006
45
BUSINESS research team—Richard Friend's group at the University of Cambridge—that spawned the organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology company Cambridge Display Technology in 1992. Plastic Logic takes materials from a host of sources—nanosilver inks from Cabot, for example, and polyethylene terephthalate sheet from DuPont Teijin Films—and uses them to design and make backplanes for flexible displays. These backplanes consist of arrays of transistors that turn specific pix els in the display on and off, just as in semi conductor-based liquid-crystal displays. THE APPLICATION is tricky. Stuart M. Evans, Plastic Logic's chief executive of ficer, explains that the surfaces of flexible substrates tend to be more distorted than flat surfaces like silicon. In normal print ing, he adds, this isn't a problem because the eye doesn't notice imperfections on very small scales. "In electronics, you are trying to get things down to the precision of a few microns," he says. "A drop of the wrong material in the wrong place can lead to a devastating short circuit." The company can point to some suc cesses. In collaboration with electronic pa per developer Ε Ink, Plastic Logic made the world's largest flexible organic active-matrix display. The display's backplane contains 480,000 transistors to activate pixels on a 10-inch black-and-white screen. Evans hopes to have commercial products available in stores sometime in 2008. He is confident about the commercial scale-up of the process, largely because the construc tion of a $15 million prototype line went
smoothly. "It was very pleasing last year to Like Plastic Logic, PolylC designs print realize that a lot of the equipment that we able electronic circuits and is developing used was off the shelf," he says. technologies for full-scale manufacturing. The Erlangen, Germany-based firm, a joint The CEO estimates that a manufactur venture between Siemens and German ing plant could be constructed for less than $100 million, an order of magnitude less than the cost of building a liquidcrystal display factory. HUGE POTENTIAL Evans is optimistic that electronics A variety of uses are forecast for organic electronics and electrics makers will be receptive to flexible displays and predicts a market for S e n S r S the backplanes of about $3 billion by Logic & memory ntho r r n ° n n^ntc other components ?i°/ 2010. "One of the curious challenges ^-r^—^^^/ that we had in the early days was this sense that we hadn't spotted what the gigantic applications would be, but I have given up worrying about that," he says. "There are 400 million newspa pers read every day." Plastic Logic's optimism is shared 16% Displays for by several stalwart investors. Among electronic products them are Dow Chemical and BASF, 21% both ofwhich participated in a recent 2020 world market (projected) = $96 billion $28 million funding round. a Includes coatings. SOURCE: IDTechEx Both Dow and BASF have other ties to printable electronics as well. Dow had been developing light-emitting printer Leonhard Kurz, is focusing on plas polymers, although it sold the business to tic RFID tags and hopes to launch its first Sumitomo Chemical. In 2004, Dow spun commercial products early next year. off Aveso, a company that is developing ulLast December, the company announced trathin displays based on a modification of a major breakthrough toward this goal: electrochromic technology. prototype tags that work at 13-56 MHz, a standard RFID frequency. "Half a year In September, BASF concluded a project ago, people were saying that this frequency with Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs and might not be reachable with organic elec Printed Systems GmbH that resulted in a tronics," says Wolfgang Mildner, PolylC's fully printed ring oscillator, a component managing director. that produces pulses in a circuit. BASF will now work with Printed Systems to explore To make organic R F I D tags commer printable electronics applications. cially viable, PolylC still needs to perfect
A GLOBAL SOURCE OF SUPPLY AND EXPERTISE SST Corporation represents the world's foremost pharmaceutical manufacturers, delivering highquality API's and formulations for multiple therapeutic classes in North America. in addition, we offer proven reliability and expertise for intermediates, Custom Synthesis and Fine Chemicals.
FROM EARLY INTERMEDIATE THROUGH BULK FORMULATION
Formulation
intermediate
SST>
SST CORPORATION Since 1948
API
VISIT US AT BOOTH 601 www.sst-corp.com
SST HEADQUARTERS AND DISTRIBUTION CENTER 635 Brighton Road, Clifton, NJ 07012 T: 1.973.473.4300 Toll Free: 1.800.222.0921 F: 1.973.473.4326 Email:
[email protected] Request more at AdlnfoNow.org 46
C & E N / FEBRUARY 13, 2006
WWW.CEN-ON LINE.0RG
peakespDoow'" l l .
I
B
R
A
R
YU
Introducing a new range of GPCR screening libraries υβ.
Your Specialist for Hazardous Reactions.
\'k
Peakexplorer™ GPCR libraries are highly focused, well characterised sets of novel, drug-like compounds created and optimised using state-of-the-art in silico design and supplied ready for screening.
Visit us at the INFORMEX2006 Stand No 624
Over 5,000 compounds now available
? •
peakdale
pushing
M
O
L
E
the
C
U
L
A
R
boundaries
Peakdale Molecular Limited Peakdale Science Park, Sheffield Road Chapel-en-le-Frith, High Peak SK23 OPG, UK
T. +44 (0) 1298 816700 F. +44 (0) 1298 816701 E.
[email protected] Call today for more information or visit us at
www.peakexplorer.com Request more at AdlnfoNow.org
dottikon EXCLUSIVE SYNTHESIS Dottikon Exclusive Synthesis AG P.O. Box, 5605 Dottikon, Switzerland, www.dottikon,con
Request more at AdlnfoNow.org
BUSINESS the roll-to-roll manufacturing process to lower fabrication costs and bring the pro cess to commercial scale. The company's goal is to eventually get the cost of its tags down to 5 cents each, Mildner says. Stan dard RFID tags cost about 20 to 30 cents apiece and can't be made below 10 cents per tag, he says. Chemical firms that would supply raw materials to the sector are also gearing up. These firms say they have made a lot of progress in developing materials such as
organic semiconductors and printable con nectors and are now fine-tuning properties for industrial-scale production. Among them is Plextronics, a Pitts burgh-based company founded in 2002 to commercialize the work of Richard D. McCullough's group at Carnegie Mel lon University in conductive regioregular polythiophenes. Shawn P. Williams, the firm's vice presi dent of technology, says several companies are working with polythiophenes in print-
The Prescription for Your XCE Development Sense of Urgencx, cGMP Compliance and World Pricing
ESSE m
mm
Analytical Method Development and Validation
Process Development and Scale-up
Β natural efficiency
Contact Information Europe : tel : i-3l ο 5160 3700 Email : marvelvelterop
