Inorganic Printed Electronics – The Great Opportunity

Silicon chips have had a good run in the electronics industry but the lowest cost chips have not changed much in price for decades and wide area silicon, as with solar cells, is heavy, expensive and in need of huge government subsidies to be sold in any volume. Truly flexible – as opposed to bendable - silicon is non-existent in practicable form. Enter thin film electronics that increasingly can be printed, unlike silicon, and is potentially of low cost and very versatile, being useful for sensors, power, memory, logic, lighting and much else besides. Here we are not just talking of semiconductors but of dielectrics, conductors and light emitters for example.