Advanced materials for organic and printed circuits

Plastics with modifiable material properties, dimensionally stable as thermoplastics, thermosets or elastomers, films or coatings, granular or expanded, are an indispensable part of our everyday lives – in anything from simple items of daily life to intricately designed structural elements in vehicles and buildings.

Plastics’ structural diversity is now being augmented by a further dimension: with suitable molecular configuration, they can also be used as electrical conductors and semiconductors (albeit with still limited mobility of the charge carriers). They thus serve as system components of “organic” and “printed” electronics. “Organic” because their transistors, sensors and LEDS are not based on silicon or gallium arsenide, but on carbon derivatives. And “printed” because two-dimensional circuit patterns can be printed “from the reel” with structural fineness of just a few tens of micrometres onto flexible and also transparent substrates by using conventional mass printing processes (flexo, screen-printing, inkjet).

Integration in objects

This yields electronically or photonically functionalised surfaces, three-dimensionally on all conceivable objects and even textiles. They form capacitive touch sensors, large-area luminous fields with OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes), sensors and detectors for environmentally or medically important data such as temperature and humidity. They operate as organic solar cells. Or as flat, printed batteries for miniaturised devices. This facilitates new, exotic applications in “smart” objects and their networking in the “Internet of Things”.

The latest (fifth) edition of the Roadmap of the OE-A (Organic and Printed Electronics Association), a work group of VDMA (German Engineering Federation) with over 220 members worldwide, illustrates the state of progress and trends in organic electronics for a ten-year period.

OLED screens and displays, the first mass market

The small OLED displays in mobile phones and smartphones have already developed into a mass market. As a result, sales with organic electronics came to roughly USD 9 billion last year. This has been forecast to develop into a global annual market of USD 200 billion by 2025. Colour-intensive and high-contrast OLED screens for 55″ televisions are already available (e.g. from Samsung and LG), although they currently cost USD 10,000.

Flexible displays for e-readers

The e-readers from Amazon and Sony with “electronic paper” from E-Ink enjoy widespread popularity because of the energy-efficient, bistable principle of their electrophoretic displays. They are essentially ideal for presenting static content such as book pages.

The next development step will bring forth lighteNEW BALANCE