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Ink-Jet Printing Facility Set to Crank Out Flexible Electronics
New plant for mass-producing custom light sensors may be the tip of the iceberg
An Austrian company announced this week that it has opened the first manufacturing plant for printing cheap, disposable light sensors onto custom surfaces such as glass and flexible plastic.
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In Nanoident's new facility, an industrial-size ink-jet machine prints circuits on top of one of several rigid or flexible materials, including paper. Just as a home ink-jet printer draws letters using ink, Nanoident's printer drizzles liquid polymer or a solution of nanoscale particles in a chosen pattern. The liquid dries and the process repeats, resulting in a sandwich consisting of up to four materials.
Each layer is 20 to 200 nanometers thick and reacts to electricity in its own way; a semiconductor mimicking silicon might be stacked between two transparent conductor layers. The sandwiches can be sculpted into numerous basic devices such as transistors, light detectors and light emitters, says Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of Bioident Technologies in Menlo Park, Calif., a U.S. subsidiary of Nanoident.
"It is flexible electronics," Bokhari says. "Most of the substrates we print on are flexible substrates."
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Bokhari says that once a printed device is designed, "within a few days we can have that in mass production. This is almost unthinkable in terms of traditional semiconductors." The new facility should be able to produce millions of devices a year, he says, with shapes as small as a micrometer in size—10 times larger than circuits in silicon microchips.
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The Nanoident facility is one of the first of a wave of printed electronics factories, says Craig Cruickshank, founder and chief analyst for cintelliq, Ltd., based in Cambridge, England.
Flexible display–makers Polymer Vision (Eindhoven, Netherlands) and Plastic Logic (Cambridge) should begin production later this year, he says, as well as PolyIC, a German firm working on printed radio bar codes for product tracking.
"What we're seeing is a completely new tool set … to enable the high-speed printing of functional devices," Cruickshank says. "People are now prepared to invest in it."
New plant for mass-producing custom light sensors may be the tip of the iceberg
An Austrian company announced this week that it has opened the first manufacturing plant for printing cheap, disposable light sensors onto custom surfaces such as glass and flexible plastic.
>
In Nanoident's new facility, an industrial-size ink-jet machine prints circuits on top of one of several rigid or flexible materials, including paper. Just as a home ink-jet printer draws letters using ink, Nanoident's printer drizzles liquid polymer or a solution of nanoscale particles in a chosen pattern. The liquid dries and the process repeats, resulting in a sandwich consisting of up to four materials.
Each layer is 20 to 200 nanometers thick and reacts to electricity in its own way; a semiconductor mimicking silicon might be stacked between two transparent conductor layers. The sandwiches can be sculpted into numerous basic devices such as transistors, light detectors and light emitters, says Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of Bioident Technologies in Menlo Park, Calif., a U.S. subsidiary of Nanoident.
"It is flexible electronics," Bokhari says. "Most of the substrates we print on are flexible substrates."
>
Bokhari says that once a printed device is designed, "within a few days we can have that in mass production. This is almost unthinkable in terms of traditional semiconductors." The new facility should be able to produce millions of devices a year, he says, with shapes as small as a micrometer in size—10 times larger than circuits in silicon microchips.
>
The Nanoident facility is one of the first of a wave of printed electronics factories, says Craig Cruickshank, founder and chief analyst for cintelliq, Ltd., based in Cambridge, England.
Flexible display–makers Polymer Vision (Eindhoven, Netherlands) and Plastic Logic (Cambridge) should begin production later this year, he says, as well as PolyIC, a German firm working on printed radio bar codes for product tracking.
"What we're seeing is a completely new tool set … to enable the high-speed printing of functional devices," Cruickshank says. "People are now prepared to invest in it."