NanoMarkets has issued a new white paper titled, "Five Opportunities for ITO Replacement". You can access the document via the following url: http://www.nanomarkets.net/resources/ITOWhitePaper.pdf or by clicking here

Five Opportunities for ITO Replacement

There is a market for low-performance transparent conductors that Indium Tin Oxide or ITO only marginally competes in. This market consists primarily in certain conductive coatings. For example, tin oxide is used in large amounts as an IR protective coating for architectural glass. However, when this low end of the transparent conductor market is excluded, the analysis above would tend to suggest that everything in the transparent conductor business would seem likely to be dominated by ITO for some time to come and that there will be few new opportunities unless one happens to be in the ITO business already and can simply climb up the growth curve with everyone else. Or if one happens to have a revolutionary new way to extract indium and/or process it into ITO products.

However, as firms in the transparent conductor business-including some with materials offerings that do not involve ITO-are quickly beginning to realize, this static view of the transparent conductor market is not accurate. There are five key opportunities in which transparent conductors are used and in which ITO doesn't quite meet the necessary specs.

In the first two of these opportunities-touch-screen displays and flexible displays-ITO is limited by its tendency to crack or break. In the third opportunity-printable electronics-ITO is limited by the ability of the industry to turn ITO into a high-performance conductive ink. In the fourth of these opportunities-solid-state lighting-ITO has been widely used as a transparent conductor for electroluminescent (EL) lighting for quite some time, but it is an open question as to whether it would be the transparent conductor of choice for the emerging area of OLED lighting. Finally, there is thin film photovoltaics, an area where ITO has never really established a presence and there may be better materials to do the job.

Flexible displays, OLED lighting and printed electronics have a certain niche-like character at the present time. This will change; both areas have the potential to generate quite sizeable amounts of transparent conductor demand in the future. Thin-film photovoltaics is only just emerging from a niche status. Touch-screen displays are already a large and growing market. All four areas are generating a demand for transparent conductors that have different characteristics than ITO classic can provide.