NanoMarkets will be releasing a report on organic electronics materials markets in December. The following is a brief excerpt

Research into the electrical properties of organic materials dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, but it is only in the last five years or so that stable organic electronics materials with well-defined properties have appeared at a commercial level. Since then organic electronics has made huge strides. It is no longer regarded as little more than scientific curiosities. Today, we already have one sizeable industry - the OLED display industry - built around such materials. Other industry sectors now seem ready to buy into organic electronics to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. These sectors include displays - both frontplanes and backplanes - RFID, photovoltaic panels, sensors and lighting, to name a few.

During 2007, the use of OLEDs in cell phone main displays has accelerated and the first OLED televisions have appeared. This year has also seen the first full-scale production of organic transistor-based display backplanes, an alliance of powerful firms committed to commercializing organic memory, and some early volume shipments of organic RFID tags.

The Worm in the Bud

All of this is very good news for the pioneers of organic electronics, who have been pushing its virtues for years. Unfortunately there is a worm in the organic electronics bud. This "worm" is the simple fact that the materials that are currently used to create organic materials have significant limitations in at least three areas. .

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This past month, the U.S. Department of Energy released a report on its summer workshop on solid-state lighting (SSL), held in Boston in July and co-sponsored by Northeast Energy Partnerships Inc. After a review of the DOE's SSL program and commercialization support plan, a discussion of the 2007 design competition, details on testing programs, an update on the criteria for EnergyStar labeling and an outline of plans for coming technology demonstrations, the workshop attendees separated into five breakout sessions to address five SSL case studies. The breakout groups were tasked with determining how to best market a hypothetical SSL product--four using LEDs, one based on an OLED--and recommending how the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy of the DOE could best help the product to attain commercial success.

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As always with emerging technologies, it's been more than interesting lately to watch the institutional alignments developing along the line of printable electronics, and there's much more to come. This past month's addition to the ongoing drama was the announcement of a hands-across-the-water team-up between Konarka in the U.S. and Toppan Forms in Japan: the former a photovoltaic technology company, the latter a printing firm.

The Konarka-Toppan partnership is another of those classic relationships of the contemporary electronics world, with the technology of the West traveling to the East for volume manufacturing. This, in turn, gives the technology credibility for use in high-volume consumer products. As in other cases, the big brother in Asia here, Toppan Forms, also provides technology enhancement, especially in terms of manufacturability and related technologies, and it provides long-established sales relationships and channels, as well.

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IBM's international chain of research centers has delivered more than its share of technical innovations over the years: the hard disk drive, for example, the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), high-temperature superconductivity in ceramics and the scanning tunneling microscope, to name just a few of the more memorable items. This month has been a particularly good month for IBM on the nano front, with various labs reporting a switch made up of a single molecule, a printing technique capable of laying down a single nanoparticle, and a new understanding of the magnetic behavior of individual atoms that could conceivably lead to single-atom memory bits of the future.

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A stamping technology developed by the Quantum Science Research operation of Hewlett-Packard Labs appears ready to start strutting its stuff out in the marketplace. Dubbed nanoimprint lithography (NIL), the technology has been used by HP to create prototype circuits with lines as narrow as 15 nanometers. This figure, according to HP, is "about one-third the dimension of the features in the most advanced circuits that will be commercially available this year."

HP licensed the NIL technology in May of this year to a startup named Nanolithosolutions, which might be considered something of an HP spinout, given that it is the recipient of HP equity funding and that one of its two cofounders is a former employee of HP Labs. Nanolithosolutions' contribution to the furtherance of the technology so far consists of a modular NIL tool for photolithographic mask- alignment equipment.

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