Norway organic electronics pioneer preps printing fab
The company is installing production equipment in the clean room and plans to open the fab in June 2017 where it will be capable of printing hundreds of millions of plastic circuits per year. The company moved there in April from its Zanker Road facility where it was capable of producing up to 24 million items per years in a batch mode.
Thin Film already has 115 employees there, according to a report in the local newspaper. The plant will initially produce an electronic article surveillance (EAS) tag for use in shops with clothing and shoes to prevent theft followed by an NFC smart product label. Thin Film plans to be using roll-to-roll printing of the EAS tags by 4Q17 and the NFC chips by 3Q18.
The 93,000 square-foot building was formerly owned by Qualcomm and features a 22,000 square-foot cleanroom. The overall cost of the printing fab has been estimated at between $32 million and $34 million, much less than the billions of dollars associated with bringing up a wafer fab for manufacturing silicon circuits.
Thin Film started out in 1994 as Opticom ASA with the goal of developing multilayer, nonvolatile memory based on ferroelectric effects in certain polymer systems. The company’s products now include Near Field Communications (NFC) tags, label sensors, and printed rewritable non-volatile memory.
The combination of NFC short-range wireless, memory and a variety of sensor circuits means that inkjet printed circuits can be used with a phone to detect such things as the integrity of products at purchase – have they been opened or tampered with – or to provide connections to further information on the Internet.
For these applications, the fact that organic electronics offer inferior performance to silicon-based electronics does not matter and because they can be printed roll-to-roll at very high speed they could become more cost effective than silicon for even more applications. That said Thin Film also
In the 2016 calendar year, Thin Film had total revenues of $3.8 million, down from $4.4 million in the previous year, on which it made a net loss of $43.7 million. Despite this difficult situation the company shipped more than 5 million EAS tags in 1Q17 and has follow up orders in the tens of millions to be fulfilled.
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