New strategy for printed electronics

Citation

(2008), "New strategy for printed electronics", Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Vol. 20 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ssmt.2008.21920dab.004

New strategy for printed electronics

Article Type: Industry news From: Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Volume 20, Issue 4

It is now generally accepted that the printed electronics is headed to be a business of the order of $300 billion yearly in about twenty years time. A number of large companies realise that this creates the opportunity to build ten billion dollar activities and some of these are finding the determination and funding to get there.

Pull through marketing

Pull through marketing helps. This is where a company at the beginning of the value chain gets involved in making finished devices in order to create a new market more quickly, thus bringing forward the need for the specialist materials required. It may then sell the device business once the materials demand has been created. For example, the world’s largest chemical company, the €57 billion BASF, making organic semiconductors and dielectrics has invested in Heliatek which is developing organic photovoltaics. Previously, organic photovoltaics had an annoying habit of being destroyed by the sun, making it analogous to a chocolate frying pan.

Breadth of ambition needed

To maximise sales, the most ambitious putative suppliers to the emerging printed electronics sector must not box themselves into a corner. For example, the majority of the materials expenditure on printed electronics concerns inorganic materials and a rapidly growing number of printed electronic devices employ composites. Those seeking to be biggest in the business cannot therefore stick to purely organic chemistry.

It is therefore interesting that the largest chemical company in the USA, the $54 billion Dow Chemical has just bought the $8.7 billion Rohm and Haas materials business for a heady $15 billion This adds a huge capability in inorganic, not just organic electronic materials to Dow Chemical. In the new electronics, Dow was previously best known for organic materials such as those it sold to Sumitomo Chemical as IP.

In 2006, Merck KGaA, a leader in organic dielectric, conducting and semiconducting inks, signed a five year agreement with the Technical University of Darmstadt to establish a jointly operated research laboratory to research novel inorganic composite materials that could be suitable for use as printable components in high-performance electronic applications. The initial area of focus is printable transistor circuits based on inorganic materials for use in RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). Series production is the objective. Then we have Du Pont and Honeywell that have been heavily involved in both organic and inorganic electronic materials for some time.

Vertical integration

The strategic options for those seeking a multi-billion dollar business in printed electronics do not end there, however. Although it is usually considered imprudent to make devices if you make materials, because you end up competing with your customers, some are finding this a manageable option. For example, one may make one type of device while selling materials for others.

Consider Bayer, the world’s oldest chemical and pharmaceutical company, with highly profitable sales of €32.4 billion. When it sold its HC Starck subsidiary that makes conductive organic inks, some felt it was leaving the printed electronics business.

However, Bayer electroluminescent polycarbonate film for lighting and displays has been developed by collaboration with Lumitec and it is marketed by the subsidiary created two years ago called Lyttron Technology. Bayer makes the Makrofol^TM polycarbonate film that is used.

Broad repertoire

Bayer subsidiary Bayer MaterialScience AG is also now able to produce cheap, high quality carbon nanotubes, on a commercial scale. The multinational company plans to market the nanomaterials worldwide under the trade name Baytubes. Bayer is also into “mechoptronics”, that is, “the interaction between mechanics, optics and electronics”. Electrical wiring diagrams, whose conductive tracks are thinner than 20 μm and thus invisible to the naked eye, can now be produced by inkjet printing using new BayInk^® nanoparticulate silver inks. The aqueous nano dispersions were developed by Bayer MaterialScience AG in cooperation with Bayer Technology Services and screen printing versions are also available.

“Our nano inks achieve ten percent of the specific conductivity of elemental silver with only a relatively low percentage of silver by weight. At the same time, they adhere very well to a wide variety of substrates, such as polycarbonate, polyethylene terephthalate, thermoplastic polyurethane and glass”, explains Dr Stefan Bahnmüller, nanotechnology expert in the New Technologies group at Bayer MaterialScience. The curing temperatures of the new nano inks are well below 130°C – much lower than those of most commercially available silver inks. Therefore, BayInk® can be printed on a variety of plastics that would otherwise not be able to withstand the thermal load during the curing process. In addition, the printed conductive tracks are very flexible and extensible. “This is, for example, particularly important for plastic films that are shaped using the film insert molding process after the wiring diagram has been printed, and are then back-injected”, says Bahnmüller. Bayer MaterialScience is working with the Universities of Jena and Marburg to reduce the width of conductive tracks made of BayInk® still further.

With sales of €10.7 billion in 2005, Bayer MaterialScience AG is one of the world’s largest polymer manufacturers. Its main fields of activity are the production of high-tech polymer materials and the development of innovative solutions for products used in many areas of everyday life. The main consumer sectors are the automotive, electrical/electronics, construction, sports and leisure industries. Bayer MaterialScience has production facilities at 40 sites around the world and a workforce of approx. 18,800. It is well able to mount a major entry into printed electronics. Its current research focus is:

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  BioBased materials and processes.

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  Optoelectronics.

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  High performance polymers.

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  Nanocomposites.

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  Functional surfaces and coatings.

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  Catalysis.

Bold entry by Solvay

Solvay, the €9.75 billion chemical giant, did some hard thinking in 2006, then leapt into the business in 2007/08. As its 2007annual report says:

“Work carried out in previous years has enabled us to clarify which fields offer particular potential for the Group. Three key applications have been selected:

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  Organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) for flat-screen displays and for lighting from flexible light sources.

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  Third-generation (organic) photovoltaic cells, produced economically, in a continuous process, on flexible supports using printing technologies.

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  Printed electronics, for example for radio frequency identification (RFID) systems” New agreements were signed in 2007 in addition to our earlier ones with the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics (COPE) of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA, the Pangaea Ventures Fund II in Vancouver (Canada).

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  A USD 10 million investment in Plextronics Inc. of Pittsburgh, PA (USA). Plextronics specializes in developing and marketing polymer-based technologies for printed electronics applications like screens and lighting, solar cells or “intelligent” labels for radio frequency identification.

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  An agreement with Thin Film Electronics ASA, a Norwegian company based in Oslo, for the joint development and production of printable electronic components like ferroelectric polymers for use in printed electronic memories.

Maybe all this will lead them into device manufacture.

The most ambitious?

However, ambitious as all this may be, the prize for sheer investment in printed electronics goes to the $20 billion Sumitomo Chemical, with its own major program in materials for printed electronics. It has bought the above mentioned IP from Dow then bought the company Cambridge Display Technology for $280 million in order to get the key Polymer OLED “POLED” patents and IP. This year, it announced that it will not stick to materials but it will even make POLED displays, presumably both rigid, large area and flexible, reading to the strengths of that technology. Ambitiously, the first product launch is slated for 2009. IDTechEx believes that such an attempt to leapfrog the leading OLED manufacturers such as Samsung may cost Sumitomo Chemical one billion dollars. After all, OLED leader Samsung has committed $0.5 billion to its latest OLED development without getting to flexible or printed versions, which most believe will be the largest market. Sumitomo Chemical is clearly planning to create a multibillion dollar activity in printed electronics.

Dr Peter HarropIDTechEX