Xaar and Thin Film Electronics Sign Development Agreement

CAMBRIDGE, England—Xaar plc, a market leader in industrial ink jet technology, and Thin Film Electronics ASA (TFE), a leading provider of non-volatile polymer memory technologies, announced that they have entered into an agreement to jointly develop industrial inkjet methods and processes that can be used for producing printed memory applications efficiently and in high volumes suitable for commercial applications.

The development agreement is built on TFE’s Intellectual Property for printable memory materials, and Xaar’s Intellectual Property, equipment and solutions for printing functional materials. This collaboration is a continuation of TFE’s and Xaar’s previous collaboration leading up to the successful development, realization, and announcement of the world’s first printed ferro-electric memory array at IPEX ‘06 held in Birmingham, UK in April 2006.

“Last year we demonstrated the world’s first functional, fully printed memory together with Xaar. We will now in this joint effort prove our technology’s manufacturability using industry standard ink-jet equipment for high volumes. Xaar is an ideal partner for us given Xaar’s technology and market leadership in ink-jet technology. Furthermore, the collaboration with Xaar will open up new exciting opportunities for the printed electronics industry, including many long sought after applications such as RFID-based electronic product codes,” said Johan Carlsson, CEO of Thin Film Electronics.

Werner Zapka, head of Xaar’s advanced applications technology team, said, “We have together with TFE already demonstrated a fully printed functional memory with unique characteristics using Xaar’s ink-jet technology. As the printed electronics market continues to evolve and expand, we see numerous opportunities for products that include memory and with that we see a market need for our ink-jet solutions for production of printed electronics products in general. In this joint effort with TFE, we will demonstrate that our industrial ink-jet manufacturing technology is capable of controlling material properties to produce devices with desired electronic functionality. To verify this, we are under this joint development agreement planning to produce thousands of product samples at our manufacturing and development site in Järfälla, Sweden.”