The Year Ahead in Printable Electronic Materials
Starting a year ago, printed electronics began to take giant steps beyond the old thick-film paradigm as the first real PE fabs started to be built. In this new environment, the materials firms that supply inks will have to adjust their product offerings to the new realities.
Perhaps the most important of these realities that materials firms will be dealing with this year and into 2009 is that as PE technology developers ramp up to full production, they will be faced with a choice of selecting a few key materials to produce in quantities. This is a very different business environment than just a few years ago, when this part of the materials business was about supplying a wide range of research materials in small quantities to the new PE and a smaller range of established conductive metal pastes to equally established customers.
Making a success of yourself in this environment will mean choosing between the old and the new. Printed electronics involves new kinds of devices and materials, but no successful firm would choose novelty for its own sake. We believe that almost no matter what, silver inks will dominate the conductive inks market over the next one to two years in spite of their high price, because of silver's high conductivity, the ease with which it can be made into inks, and the long history of making such inks. There is always a good reason to go with the tried and trusted. Another example can be found in the growing acceptance in the thin-film electronics industry that while printing has its place, the idea of the printing plant replacing the fab is a little bit simplistic, or at least futuristic.
Yet another factor that one might cite as grounds for conservatism in this industry is that the printed electronics industry is beginning to adopt some of the ways of the old semiconductor industry. And its not just about the equipment that's being used. Firms making active organic materials are talking about organic CMOS and "materials sets" and silicon itself is being printed. Indeed, we have identified printed electronics copying from the established semiconductor world as one of the key trends for the next couple of years.
The most obvious way that this will manifest itself will be in printed devices based on nanosilicon inks. Initially, these will be simple PV devices next year, with some RFID devices the year after; perhaps before. But, admittedly, these are somewhat risky prophesies. It is by no means certain that any such printed nanosilicon device can meet the performance requirements of such applications. There are plenty of other technologies that could get us to the same kind of product. Where we believe we will see some real impact of printed silicon in the next couple of years is in the area of transfer/contact printing. NanoMarkets believes that this offers a way of getting rapidly to a point where we can offer sophisticated processing power on a flexible substrate. It is hard to think of any other approach that is likely to get us to that goal that quickly.
Printed silicon is also, of course, an example of one of the other key trends we have identified, namely the trend to experiment with new kinds of inks. There are various commercial reasons for doing this and in couple of areas where they have become acute. Sputtering ITO is not a way to create transparent conductors that anyone was ever in love with and printing ITO may offer a way forward. ITO inks have been around for a while now and we would expect more of them to appear on the market in the not too distant future. They may, however, not provide enough resiliency for improved touch-screen displays. What may serve better in this application would be CNT-based preparations, which are again likely to be printed. We will certainly be hearing more about such preparations from firms such as Unidym and Eikos in the next year or so. CNTs are not the only nanomaterials that are becoming more prominent in printed electronics; nanometallic inks promise higher conductivity, lower temperatures for curing and greater suitability for ink-jet printing. NanoMarkets expects that during the 2008-2009 period we will begin to see a significant take up of these nanoinks. However, this will be offset to some extent by the growing role of flexography and gravure, which enable higher volumes of electronic devices to be printed, but have less need for nanoinks. Ink makers will have to adjust their market stories accordingly to emphasize the curing and conductivity of nanoinks.
NanoMarkets also believes that 2008 and 2009 will see considerable activity in the area of solution-processed OLED materials and perhaps other applications too. These have actually been around for a while now, but they drew considerable attention at the recent SID show where they were being championed by DuPont and UDC. It remains an open question whether any major progress will be made in the short-term to commercializing better materials than pentacene for OTFTs. This is possible, but the applications for OTFTs are growing only slowly and there are technological alternatives, so printed single-crystal organic transistors still seem a bit far off, although we would expect to be hearing more of these kinds of transistors out of some of the major research groups.
Finally, there is that trend towards printing on flexible substrates that continues to accelerate, especially in the display and thin-film PV area. For the most part, there will be no great leap forward in the usual substrates-foil and plastic-but NanoMarkets believes that printing on paper will become a much-heard theme in printed electronics over the next year or so.
