Printed Electronics Gets More Ambitious

Many different needs - a place for all

These are exciting times, with wristwatches being developed that charge the battery from transparent photovoltaics over the viewing glass so the battery then lasts longer than you do. Photovoltaics is in space. This has its own requirements of radiation and heat tolerance, very high efficiency and very light weight so these are being met by complex multilayer constructions using thin films, for example involving gallium and germanium. However, if we are to generate very large amounts of power from broad widths of tape unrolled alongside hundreds of miles of freeway, we may care little about efficiency and a great deal about cost, so the exciting new organic photocells made by high speed printing processes may be the answer, even at the 5-6% efficiency now achieved.