At a display conference last year, I visited the exhibitor booth of a company who has been a rising star in the printed electronics area. When they learned that I came from a graphic arts background, their comment was that ordinary printers won't be involved in printed electronics. My first thought was that this comment was interesting since the holding company who founded the exhibitor numbers among its member companies several printing firms. My next thought was that in more than 20 years working in the graphic arts field I am not sure if I have ever met an ordinary printer.

I've met printers who do high-quality work and those whose work makes you wonder how they stay in business. I'm also known printers who seem to work magic on a printing press. I suppose you could call them extraordinary, but again, I'm not sure that I have ever met their "ordinary" counterparts.

However, it does rather raise the question of the roll of the printer in printed electronics.

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As a follow up to a previous blog entry, I wanted to expand on Opalux, who has developed a new technology for color e-paper. The technology called P-ink for Photonic ink uses structured photonic crystals to produce colors, which the company says are electronically tunable across the entire visible spectrum and beyond. The company was co-founded by André Arsenault Ph.D., a chemist at the University of Toronto. Joining Dr. Arsenault are several other chemists from the University including: Ulrich Kamp, PhD., Assaad Ghoussoub, PhD. and Daniel Puzzo. The technology itself was developed by Arsenault in conjunction with Geoffrey Ozin and Daniel Puzzo at the University of Toronto and Ian Manners at the University of Bristol in the U.K.

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There is an increasing drive to make a completely wireless world. However, while battery technology has come a long way, it has not come far enough. Sustainable operation of battery-powered wireless embedded systems remains a key challenge. There are numerous alternative technologies being explored including thin-film and printed batteries, energy harvesting and new strategies for recharging conventional lithium-ion batteries, among others. One of the alternatives that has recently made headlines-several times-is biomaterial-based batteries.

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Forest fires can cause untold damage in property and even lost life in so many areas around the world, that any help in detecting and thus controlling them would be a definite environmental plus. A company called Sensible Solutions has developed a low-cost printed sensor that could be used to detect changes in temperature and deployed in such a way to help provide early detection of forest fires.

The system consists of a family of small, low-cost, non-serviceable and disposable radio communicating fire sensors to work with an early forest fire detection system. Lightweight sensor units carrying an electronic identity number are placed in the trees (from the air or from the ground). When subjected to high temperatures for a few seconds before it may be destroyed, the (fire) sensor transmits a radio signal with a unique identity code (RFID technology). The fire position is identified on detecting the alarm transmission, when the sensor ID is linked to a deployment location through the database. The system, which makes use of printed sensors, is low-cost, and it can be extended to cover a very large forest area. The alarm signal can be transmitted up to 20 or 30 kilometers.

The sensors can actually be dropped from the air, via small parachutes made from cotton, which entangle in the branches. With a lifetime of 10 years, the sensors are environmentally friendly, even when burned. The product is slated for commercialization next year. Obviously, it is not as simple as it sounds on paper, but it demonstrates how useful small, low-cost printed sensors could be in such applications.

While not printed, organic sensors have also found application in several environmental applications. One area of research is aimed at monitoring the water quality in waste and river water. As part of the National Centre for Sensor Research in Dublin Ireland, SmartCoast is a multidisciplinary applied research project developing smart sensors and wireless sensor networks for monitoring water quality. One of the research projects is developing an ion-selective electrode (ISE), actually a polymer membrane-based potentiometric sensor. Its purpose would be to monitor water quality and also to detect contaminants in the case of some sort of biological attack. The researchers feel that the devices would have low manufacturing cost and low power requirements. While such sensors were previously not considered suitable for such applications due to detection limits, these have now been pushed down to nanomolar and sometimes even picomolar levels.

Finally, another company EcoBioServices and Research has taken research done at the University of Florence on screen-printed electrodes in disposable electrochemical sensors and commercialized it into several products. The molecular interaction between immobilized DNA strands and target pollutants are used for genotoxicity evaluation. For detection of neurotoxicity, Cobalt (II)-phthalocyanine (CoPC) modified SPCEs were used as transducers to develop an amperometric acetylcholinesterase-based biosensor. Finally, its HM-sensor has an electrode, which has been modified to detect heavy metals. By coupling them with a portable apparatus, it is possible to perform on-site analysis in a very short time with high reproducibility. The system can also be integrated with wireless systems for remote control.

As such low-cost disposable sensors become more widespread, it could become a boom to environmental monitoring, which in turn could become a very profitable potential market.

Since I've been working on a market report on printed and organic sensors, my conversations have tended to include topics such as electronic noses and artificial/smart skin. I think that my son-in-law (a science fiction fanatic) is half convinced that I'm building a robot in my basement. Understand that I would love a robot to help around the house and perhaps in the yard. Unfortunately, there is no robot under construction in my basement.....and there probably won't be one for some time.

To date, robotics technology in the private sector has mostly been confined to industrial production, in the form of large and small devices used to manufacture everything from microchips to cars. According to the Robotics Industries Association, approximately 180,000 have been installed in the United States since their inception in the 1960s. Used mainly in the automotive industry for welding and material handling, converts have been very positive about their advantages and growth in this sector has averaged in the 20% range. However, there has been little success in moving robotics beyond industrial applications into the domestic military or medical sector. The robot that would help clean the house, protect workers in hazardous terrain, perform surgery, care for patients, and entertain children is still the stuff of science fiction. Several times in the last 25 years, experts have declared that this was the year of the robot. It has never materialized.

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