Organic Electronics Materials: New Revenues and New Challenges

By 2015 materials makers will also have to supply organic electronics materials that are designed for an industry that will be shipping devices in quantities. This will of course mean that these suppliers will also have to ship in quantity. And they will also have to adjust their offerings to work better with in large-scale manufacturing plants. These plants now seem more likely to use versions of traditional evaporation, coating and flexo printing, rather than the much touted ink-jet approaches. It has been interesting to see how as firms have ramped up production during 2007, they have tended to lean on the more traditional processes. For example, Plastic Logic has recently bought some Aixtron thin-film deposition to create the dielectric layer in its backplane, while still touting themselves as the having “developed the first process for printing electronic circuits on plastic substrates to be ramped-up to an industrial scale.”