European plastic electronics industry flexes its muscles

Technology News | October 20, 2014

By eeNews Europe

It was interesting to see both researchers and industrial players share their views on where plastic electronics is heading, and what could make its market adoption faster.

During a round table on the topic, most speakers agreed that 2014 had been a significant year for the market take-off of plastic electronics, but in order to compete with or complement silicon, organic electronics has yet to find new application areas, where its large-scale conformability and flexibility enable new designs (photovoltaics and OLED lighting being the most prominent ones).

So far the consensus is that plastic electronics (PE) is most likely going to find its way into so-called hybrid designs, where small islands of rigid silicon-based electronics (for cheap efficient digital processing) are connected and encapsulated within flexible layers of printable electronics acting as a multi-sensor user interface.

There isn’t really a standard for interconnecting hard silicon to flexible substrates, but solutions are under development such as metallized pads on polyimide as a support material to ensure a smooth transition between rigid interposers and stretchable connections with progressively narrowing traces of a meander shape.

With proper mould design and wavy trace patterns, Imec achieves a gradual transition between thicker electronic islands and thinner flexible and stretchable parts.

So, before full plastic electronics systems ever come to light, foil-based systems will make the transition. Looking at cost of ownership, PE is not as cheap as it ought to be, because inorganic semiconductor chemistries are still too expensive, some actors claims, but also because it lacks a high volume driver.

And even though a lot of PE circuits can be printed in sheet-to-sheet manufacturing processes, roll-to-roll printing is what’s truly needed to achieve a low cost per transistor at very high volumes.

Yole Developpement’s price per sensor module versus volume predictions for a viable plastic electronics industry.

Now, what new business models could create demand and initiate a rush for high volume foil-based systems?

Ynvisible’ CEO Ines Henriques, who successfully crowd-funded the first production batch of its printoo arduino-compatible printed electronics design platform, hinted at new Business-to-Consumer opportunities.

“Typically, PE has focused on B2B markets, approaching brand owners or the military for large volume orders. But big corporations are risk-averse, and for us, producing in high-volume while guaranteeing double-sourcing is still quite a challenge. There should be more initiatives to market PE through new business-to-consumer (B2C) opportunities”, commented Henriques.

“There is a crowd of creative people, engineers, entrepreneurs, who have ideas about how to use the technology and what to do with it, but they don’t have access to it”, she added.

“So we could expect these people to come up with new ideas and create new markets, if only they had the tools to use the technology” she concluded.

Henriques thinks that rather than aim at huge businesses first, one way to go forward is to dominate some niche, low volume markets and then expand progressively.

“Customization is a key differentiator”, highlighted Chris Rider, Director of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Large-Area Electronics at Cambridge University.

The cost of tooling up a new chip for an application is very high, but using plastic electronics, there is a way to customize products more easily, Rider explained. This could be using common interconnected islands of silicon on a mechanically customized flexible solution, with different sensor shapes and functionalities.

“But the market will only accept plastic electronics at an acceptable cost”, moderated Metin Koyuncu, Senior Project Manager at Robert Bosch GmbH. “Customers don’t care if it’s plastic or conventional ICs inside”, he added.

“The hardware only gets a meaning if you can get a service out of it, but it is difficult to survive as a business if you only rely on hardware components. So you need to shift from just selling products to offering products and services. But who can do the contract manufacturing in plastic electronics to reduce the cost of hardware?” Asked Koyuncu.

“We need someone able to consolidate all the different manufacturing processes, to fulfil the great potential of PE” he argued.

“But plastic electronics is hardware, and one has to look at where the Internet of Things (IoT) is taking us to see where the value will be”, noted Henriques. “Will it be in the hardware or in the networked data? IoT still requires low power devices and this is one of the advantages of plastic electronics over other systems” she said.

“I am a bit sceptical about IoT as a driver”, intervened Barbara Stadlober, Head of department at Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH. “But large area electronics is an entirely new domain that could drive the need for PE”, she said, mentioning robot skins or the functionalization of large-scale surfaces for medical or home monitoring applications.

“Where PE could have a great impact is by replacing silicon and other circuitry with bio-degradable electronics” said Stadlober, alluding to her lab’s recent work on the use of cellulose as a dielectric layer in organic electronics.

“When they are thrown away, today’s mobile phones have a larger environmental footprint than a car from the seventies”, noted Stadlober, “We have a huge eWaste issue, so we need to think about replacing silicon electronics with biodegradable circuits to save the environment”.

“We need to open our manufacturing capabilities in Europe, to smaller companies, and decrease the financial threshold for them to access the technology”, said Stadlober, talking about what could enable a broader adoption of plastic electronics.

“The EU funds a lot of research but there are not enough instruments to help take that research to marketable products” complained Henriques.

Manager of the Organic Electronic Division at CEA tech, Christophe Serbutoviez emphasized the importance of sharing design rules, to demonstrate new usages and show that the technology is mature.

“What we need is standardization, something that is not enough addressed in this conference”, lamented Koyuncu from an industrial player’s perspective, adding that the first steps in the right direction are already coming from the Far East.

While sensors and circuits were largely dominating the PE design topics, Piezotech’s CEO Fabrice Domingues Dos Santos presented a new set of actuators made from so-called relaxor-ferroelectric terpolymers P(VDF-TrFE-CFE).

Piezotech’s paper-thin transparent printed speakers play the music from a smartphone. You could also play notes from their printed piezoelectric keyboard.

When stressed with an electrical field (circa 150MV/m), the directly printable co-polymers exhibit high electrostrictive strain (>7%) with a relative high modulus (1GPa for stretched films).

Possible applications for such actuators include reconfigurable braille surfaces, microfluidic pumps, or paper-thin transparent printed speakers as demonstrated at CEA-Tech’s exhibition stand together with printed keyboards.