From NanoMarkets' recent report, Thin-Film and Printed Battery Markets

The thin-film/printable battery sector continues to excite the imagination of futurists and journalists because it summons up images of an Internet-of-things, with the things in question being powered by paper-thin batteries.

This is an exciting prospect, but the realities of the thin-film/printable batteries business have so far not proved as rosy as most once hoped.  Many (but by no means all) of the firms active in this space are unfunded or otherwise stretched financially.  Others are pretty close to being science projects. NanoMarkets' estimates for this year's revenues from thin-film/printable batteries is just under $30 million; not impressive for an industry sector that has been around for quite a few years now.

NanoMarkets recent report on this topic, however, suggests that there is considerable hope for the thin-film/printable batteries in the future.  We see especially good prospects for such batteries in the sensors, smart cards and RFID sectors.  However, this is a demand-side analysis and begs the question of whether, how and to what degree firms in the thin-film/printable battery space are able to design strategies to capitalize on the opportunities.

Success in the Thin-Film/Printable Battery Space:  How Four Companies Define Their Strategy

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This article is based in part on research from Materials Markets for Inorganic Thin-Film Photovoltaics: 2010

Thin-film silicon (TF Si) photovoltaics has been around for a long time, but went through boom times during a period when there wasn't enough crystalline silicon to satisfy demand by the PV industry; TF Si uses about one-hundredth the amount of silicon used by crystalline silicon PV. The most mature of the TFPV technologies, TF Si currently accounts for about 43 percent of the TFPV market.

But now that the silicon shortage is over, TF Si PV has to compete on its own merits at a time when CIGS and CdTe PV offering a compelling alternative. Such technologies offer the same lightweight and small form factor as TF Si but with higher conversion efficiencies. CdTe has the lowest cost-per-megawatt of all TFPV technologies. CIGS PV, on the other hand, offers the highest efficiency of all TFPV technologies--20 percent for champion cells.

While there may be some niche applications in which TF Si offers some benefit over the other TFPV technologies, only cost and/or performance improvements will help it hold onto its market share. NanoMarkets suspects these improvements, if they come at all, will arrive through changes in the absorber layer. We believe that there are four specific technical directions from which these improvements might emerge: multi-junction cells, cells using micro-silicon materials, cells using nanocrystalline silicon and printed silicon.

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This article is based in part on research from Opportunities in Carbon-Based Inks, Pastes, and Coatings for Electronics Applications: 2010

Carbon materials have been an important part of electronics throughout the industry's history. But far from being a stagnant class of materials, new developments in carbon materials are poised to make dramatic performance improvements in the applications that use them and to enable completely new applications. Eventually, these new classes of materials may even revolutionize the electronics industry as we know it.

Conventional carbon inks, pastes, and coatings make up a critical--if sometimes overlooked--class of materials in the electronics industry, providing solutions that are modestly conductive as well as cheap, easy to apply, and inert. Carbon is thus an important entry in the portfolio of materials used for conductive coatings, especially when extremely low resistivity is not required. While these conventional materials and applications are certainly not the most exciting in the electronics industry, they have been a consistent source of revenues. But now new, breakthrough materials--carbon nanotubes and grapheme--are breathing new life into the carbon materials market and making carbon "sexy". Nanocarbon materials are already enabling new applications that take advantage of conductivity much higher than that of any metal. Down the road are even more possibilities that could provide carbon the status that silicon currently holds in the electronics industry.

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This article is based in part on research from An Opportunity Analysis for OLED Lighting: 2009 to 2016

It's the beginning of a new year, and like any other we like to look back on the year past and look forward to see what's cooking for the year ahead. For OLED lighting, this is of especial importance: the industry saw its first commercial products, albeit extremely expensive ones, in 2009, which begs the question, will 2010 be the year for "affordable" OLED lighting-ones you and I could possibly purchase?

The answer to this question appears to be "no." While companies have achieved significant strides in OLED performance, materials costs as well as the high cost of manufacturing (low volumes) still leave OLEDs with a high price tag. This is not to say that there's nothing to look forward to this year. On the contrary, as we discuss below, we expect to see more "products," ones being commissioned by designers and luminaire companies, as well as museums and the like. This on-slot (onslaught) of products will bring OLED lighting to the forefront of public attention, possibly giving the attention needed to push up demand and thus justify the construction of large-scale manufacturing lines for OLED lighting. This will hopefully bring down the price, making 2011 the first year for a "more affordable" OLED lighting product.

Year in Review

Last year was supposed to see the commercial takeoff of OLED televisions.

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NanoMarkets has released a new report, "Indium Tin Oxide and Alternative Transparent Conductor Markets". The following is an excerpt from the report.

The transparent conductor industry is dominated by a single material-indium tin oxide (ITO). Manufacturers of flat panel displays (the largest users of ITO) have relied on this material for years but have always griped about ITO's inability to meet their requirements. When used as a conductor, ITO is not very conductive, and as a transparent layer, it is not very transparent. Beyond this fundamental shortcoming is the fact that ITO is generally difficult and expensive to apply as a thin film of sufficient quality. Once it is applied, it is brittle, and therefore can easily wear out or crack when used in applications where bending is involved. The price for this mediocre performance is quite high, since ITO is dependent on indium, which has been priced at $350 to $1,000 for the last several years.

ITO's many faults would seem to create a ripe environment for competition-new transparent conductor materials offering improved performance in the areas where ITO falls short, and different methods of using and applying ITO to address these issues.

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