While the conventional electronics like computers and smartphones is built around silicon integrating billions of transistors and is manufactured using complex, costly and wasteful processes in multi-billion dollar foundries . The printed and flexible electronics aim to replace this by “organic” semiconductors which are long chains of thousands of repeating molecules (a plastic), made with materials based on carbon. Organic semiconductors can be made to be soluble, and can be turned into an ink.
Printing electronics is a special type of manufacturing, where electronic components, circuits, and systems are developed on a wide variety of substrates in a similar fashion as drawing text and figures on a paper, textile, and handicrafts. The difference between normal printing and printed electronics is that in printed electronics, functional material is used as ink that exhibits functionalities of insulator, conductor, and semiconductor materials, which are essential for the electronic devices. This means it’s possible to print electronic circuits, with the potential to manufacture components as fast as printing newspapers. A printer would do this by applying different inks onto the film. As the inks dried, they would turn into wires, transistors, capacitors, LEDs and all the other things needed to make displays and circuits.
Simplified processing steps, reduced materials’ wastage, low-fabrication costs, and simple patterning techniques make printing technologies very attractive when compared to standard microfabrication in clean room processes. The potential benefits of printed and flexible electronics include thinness, lighter weight, greater durability, and the ability for conformal integration. The intrinsic scalability of printing as a manufacturing process is also of great advantage; the process lends itself to production runs of an arbitrary size. The concept appears to provide a likely path to truly all-embracing electronics. Printed and flexible electronics (PFE) have potential to revolutionize multiple markets—health care, environmental monitoring, displays, human-machine interactivity, energy, communication, and wireless networks.
The potential uses for Printed Electronics are endless: custom electronics for smart packaging, smart wearable devices in conformal shapes, and sensors incorporated in the design of buildings, cities, cars, airplanes and just about any other device. Interest in sensors has become more prevalent due to the interest in the Internet of Things, autonomous cars and many other applications. Wearables are another area of growth. Meanwhile, RFID is growing rapidly and new possibilities are emerging in the health and wearables space. Printed Electronics will give people a low-cost, efficient way to embed intelligence into all products and objects surrounding us. That’s why Printed Electronics are paving the way for the “Internet of Everything,” and are capturing the hearts and minds of our Innovation researchers and scientists.
Printed and Flexible electronics have already started to appear in our daily lives, for example in car manufacturing with printed aerials, smart textiles with pressure sensors to recognize seat occupancy and self-dimming rearview mirrors, or in the medical field with medical test strips with diagnostic electrodes. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a flexible wearable sensor that can accurately measure a person’s blood alcohol level from sweat and transmit the data wirelessly to a laptop, smartphone or other mobile device.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed “optoelectronic skin”, with an ultra-thin, flexible LED display that can be worn on the back of your hand. China has developed a new electronic paper, heralded as “the world’s first graphene electronic paper,” by Chen Yu, general manager of Guangzhou OED Technologies. The material can be used to create hard or flexible graphene displays, used in electronic products such as e-readers and wearable smart devices.
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