NanoMarkets has announced a new upcoming report titled, Silver Inks and Pastes for Printable Electronics: 2008-2015. The following entry is an initial perspective on the silver inks and pastes market.

Silver inks and pastes continue to occupy a unique position in the printable electronics industry. They are still the only printed materials that have been mainstreamed and are widely used to create electrodes in a variety of applications, using screen printing mostly. Membrane switches, automotive heaters, capacitors, conductive tracks in PCBs, and conventional (i.e., not thin-film) photovoltaics all routinely use printed silver and printed silver is also used for certain classes of EMI shielding. Together such applications will account for hundreds of millions of dollars in silver inks and pastes in 2008. Applications in the display industry and especially in RFID antennas, a product that could end up being sold in billions are not too far off into the future. Today, there may be as many as 20 firms currently supplying silver inks for electronic applications.

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Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) has been the transparent conductor-of-choice for most display applications due to its superior combination of environmental stability, relatively low electrical resistivity and high transparency.  The fact that it gets high marks on these performance characteristics has also meant that it has also become the benchmark for other emerging applications -- such as photovoltaics -- that need transparent conductors.

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Many years ago at a computing conference in San Jose, a friend and I duck into a lecture theater to chat about a business deal. We think it is deserted . . . it isn't.

Standing at the front of the room, alone and practicing for a keynote is none other than Bill Gates. My friend and I retreat to another room without so much as an I'm-not-worthy or a hello. We've been kicking ourselves ever since. We didn't SAY a thing. I mean, here we were with the guy who created the personal software industry, a guy who would have never met with us, who would never have taken a call from us. And we just ran away.

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One final week of chats with the ITO cognoscenti. "What do they make of all those ITO replacements?" It turns out that they all believe that none of the current ITO replacements work well yet in terms of transparency or conductivity. Or both. Even the companies that make ITO replacements seem to agree on that! And they don't agree on much else! One interviewee tells me "ITO on glass is unbeatable." And he's the guy selling an ITO substitute!

Makes you wonder why he's bothering.

The answer to this question seems to be that there are already some niches where an ITO substitute makes sense for particular reasons. The two that are mentioned most frequently are electrostatic coatings and touch screen displays. In both instances, the share of value represented by ITO is quite big; 20 percent for a touch screen I am told. High Indium prices matter in these ITO intensive markets. For some large LCD displays, that proportion is just 5 percent, so Indium prices matter less.

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This week I have continued my travels in the world of indium tin oxide (ITO) as I continue the last stages of work on our upcoming report: The Future of ITO: Transparent Conductor and ITO Replacement Markets. Mainly I've been talking to product managers and technologists about where the world of transparent semiconductors is headed. The details of my conversations will be in the report, but I want to point out just how much fun this week and the discussions I've had have been.

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