Industrial + Specialty Printing

We must invest in innovation to ensure that the jobs and industries of the future are built.

By Gail Flower

Picture this, a gathering of about 450 serious experts in printed electronics at the 10th Annual Flexible Electronics & Displays Conference in Phoenix this February, all prepared to present their capabilities to a seriously learned audience. Attendees came from high-tech companies, the U.S. Army, NIST, universities, and manufacturers.

The first presentation was Delivering Capabilities to the Warfighter by David Honey, Ph.D., Office of the Director of Defense Research & Engineering. According to Honey, there’s a shift in the technical talent base from U.S. builds to more foreign builds of weapons systems. The Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) Mission Set is to defend the U.S., succeed in counterinsurgency, build the security of partner states, and deter and defeat aggression. As such, the QDR is involved in ubiquitous autonomous robots, superfast computers, ultra-secure communications, precise navigation and detection, and novel materials with strange properties—metamaterials that bend light backwards, have invisibility properties, materials morphing, and artificial muscles. The Army’s booth had camo uniforms with printed electronics built into the fabric.

Printed batteries have made progress in the past year. Gary Johnson, president of Westlake, OH-based Blue Spark Technologies, handed out samples of his company’s printed batteries, no larger than a large Band-Aid patch. Yet the Blue Spark UT is a thin, flexible battery that is designed for transit tickets, powered display cards, and battery-assisted RFID. The Blue Spark HD (high-drain) Series is designed for applications that require an extra boost of power, such as musical greeting cards, promotional toys, and transdermal patches. Enfucell Oy, based in Vantaa, Finland, has also developed a SoftBattery, a thin, flexible, environmentally friendly power source.

Tim Bradow of Infinite Power Solutions talked about THINERGY Micro-Energy that provides energy storage with power density and extended, rechargeable service life. These can be combined with solar cells and power-management ICs for constant, maintenance-free power supplies.

James Stasiak of Hewlett-Packard presented information on digital printing, flexible electronics, and smart packaging. Although the industry remains years away from fabricating a low-cost Pentium-class processor on plastic, there has been steady progress towards realizing this vision with the latest in electronic materials, devices and circuits, low-temp fabrication process, and roll-to-roll manufacturing.

HP’s laboratories address smart-packaging efforts to meet the needs of industrial and commercial printing markets by using the HP Scitex and Indigo platforms. Soon, Stasiak stated, HP will print RFID labels along with other visible and invisible deterrents. A digitally fabricated, flexible package will be a backplane where high-performance analog and digital circuitry and MEMS devices will be located in the smart drug, blister-package foil.

The competition to keep costs low, have a visible display—even in sunshine—and producing color provides a race for most e-book manufacturers. Nam-Seok Roh of Samsung Electronics talked about plastic LCD technologies for thin and light tablets.

Many presenters had adhesives, coatings, flexible substrates, and conductive inks for low-cost production of solar panels. But the PV market as it stands today depends on policies, not markets or materials.

As I drove from the airport in Kentucky to Cincinnati’s sparkling city by the river, I thought about the note in my e-mail from Obama that said, “That’s why we must invest in innovation, to ensure that the jobs and industries of the future are built....” It will be an exciting future.