Printed Electronics Europe 2010Dresden, Saxony, Germany13th and 14th April 2010

Microelectronics International

ISSN: 1356-5362

Article publication date: 3 August 2010

112

Citation

(2010), "Printed Electronics Europe 2010Dresden, Saxony, Germany13th and 14th April 2010", Microelectronics International, Vol. 27 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/mi.2010.21827cac.004

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2010, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Printed Electronics Europe 2010Dresden, Saxony, Germany13th and 14th April 2010

Article Type: Conferences and exhibitions From: Microelectronics International, Volume 27, Issue 3

Day 1 – Tuesday 13th April

A glorious Saxony Spring morning heralded the early start of the first busy day of the 2010 Printed Electronics Conference in Dresden. Within the vastness of the Maritim Congress Centre on the banks of the river Elbe, Dr Peter Harrop, IDTechEx Chairman, welcomed the delegates to the event. Printed electronics is a fast-moving subject, and the programme reflected the volume of subjects being covered. There had been some significant events in the last year, these included printed copper (at last), carbon loaded paper, nano-silicon, flexible photovoltaics, flexible OLED lighting, with transparent electronics as a new concept. Most electronics printers still try to sell components, but the market is for hardware, and complete systems, and whilst there is still fragmentation within the industry, it was evident that attempts are being made for a cohesive approach to potential opportunities. The printed electronics market will be worth $40 billion by 2020 and $335 billion by 2029, and this may account for the burgeoning interest in conferences such as this, with attendance of over 900 delegates, up 40 per cent from last year.

Dr Christopher Bower is one of the leading lights at the Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge. Working with the University, they see nanotechnology as an enabling technology for mobile devices; it is engineering at scales of less than 100 nm, (he illustrated this by showing some printing on a human hair, to give an indication of scale), and the project is called Morph. They are working on nano-enabled energy, stretchable transformable structures, and smart surface materials. He described a tactile sensor made from zinc oxide nano-wires, which is both transparent and flexible, and by using PDMS and gold one can make a whole range of sensors. He illustrated nanostructured fluoropolymer which forms a self-cleaning surface which is hydrophobic. Electrochromic colour-change materials employing palladium pentoxide were described, and engineering the use of nanotechnologies will require new manufacturing techniques, which, neatly, is where printed electronics comes in.

Dr Mark Vermeersch is with TOTAL Gas & Power. They have 23 research centres around the world, and are developing an energy mix, involving solar power plants, and have an $80 million turnover in this field. They are working with specific partners, IMEC in Belgium on crystal silicon cells, on thin films for photovoltaics, and with Konarak on organics and hybrids. They regard organic photovoltaics as the major disruptive innovation of the decade, whose physical properties include flexible application, lightweight, and adaptability. It can be coloured, or see-through, and it is sensitive to low light and off angle performances. Raw materials are abundant, there is potential for mass fabrication at low cost and it is efficient. From the paper it would appear that Total are going to provide technology that their customers do not know that they want yet, which shows great foresight and commitment.

Dr Kenneth McGuire is Principle (sic) Scientist with Proctor and Gamble who make detergents, along with about 300 well-known branded products. Their interest in printed electronics starts when the customer is “choosing and using”. Having a packet of soap powder talk to one would be novel indeed. Dr McGuire touched upon the rules of engagement at P&G – the sheer scale of the operation, all products have to have global reach, have to have a potential of $100 million in sales as a minimum, and have to be tough and robust. They need solutions, but were not sure how, and we were not sure what the problems were that they need the solutions to. They also said that they need to create things, but we were advised there is a question of their being able to pay for them.

Dr Devandan Shenoy is from DARPA in the USA. This is the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is famous for having invented RPVs (drones) and GPS. DARPA consists of seven divisions, and are concerned with breakthroughs in material and technologies that provide new capability for the Department of Defence. He commented that the technology we are developing today may take ten years to get into a system. A new class of autonomous systems included pilotless drones, and here printed electronics can play a role in adaptable and intelligent microsystems,. One example of their work is the wide FOV (field of view) camera lens for surveillance vehicles, incorporating flexible PVs and organic semi-conductors for flexible distributed electronics. They have found that printed electronics have provided many key attributes – the fabless creation of circuits, rapid prototyping; they are cheap, disposable, and employ low temperature processing. He, too, is looking to find out what the printed electronics industry can offer DARPA.

Konrad Herre is from Plastic Logic who manufacture flexible displays for digital information. They were a spin-out from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 2000, and in 2006 they built the factory in Dresden; they have an HQ in Mountain View in California, as well as an innovation centre in Cambridge. In January 2010, they launched their new production facility capable of producing several thousand displays per week. Konrad reviewed the story on how the company began, and the steps taken to get into production from a pilot-line in Cambridge to mass production using new equipment. Happily the local skills in Dresden were already in existence, as some 30,000 people are employed in the semiconductor industry in Saxony. They use direct write fabrication for primary imaging, and a combination of wet coating and dry patterning. Layer stacks give some complexity, and testing is essential to establish good operating parameters. They have a defect density analysis through all the process steps, as organic material shows different behaviour, temperature sensitivities and reaction to cycling. Konrad explained the QUE™, the worlds first proReader; it offers large display, is light, thin and shatterproof. It is touch key navigated, and covers the space between the PC and the mobile telephone. As a business tool it is invaluable. How it compares to the iPad was unclear.

Solar cell integration in mobile applications was the title of a paper from Stephanie Fajtl at ST Ericsson. Wireless is their speciality, and they have developed what is known as PowerHub©, a wireless power supply for a mobile device. Integrating solar cells into a mobile telephone was the premise, these are connected in series and parallel configuration to maximise the light sources. Packaging is demanding, too, as one has to consider thermal protection, amongst others. Harvested power assumes sunlight, of course, but is a low cost solution. Whilst solar power is efficient, there are some constraints on using solar panels within the mobile appliances, but solar energy harvesting starts to be interesting for mobile applications. Stephanie presented a technology that is only just around the corner. The product exists but is not widely available commercially. She explained the appliance would require ten minutes of good sunshine to give one minute of talk time. Given conditions in the UK in winter, for example, one is concerned about being able to communicate at all with such a device. However, a year is a long time in such developments and by 2011 it may all look very different.

Sharp Laboratories of America have Dr Tolis Voutsas, who spoke on their work in the field of printed electronics. Their technology labs in California are equipped in such a way that they have been able to look at various thin film technologies. The main driver in this field is cost. How one can extract value from cost down was described, involving various technologies. Printed Electronics are forecast to grow from $1.9 billion in 2008 to $57 billion by 2019, and Sharp want to capture part of the market. Here, the products such as inorganic semiconductors, either silicon-based, such as SiNP, and SiNW, and then non-silicon. Silicon Nano-Particle can be formed by SiH4 pyrolysis in a CO2 laser beam and subsequent downstream collection. Silicon NanoWires are made before a spread on the mother glass, and works quite well. Amorphous oxides are thought to be a development that will emerge soon. Organic semiconductors are well known, the small molecule systems give high performance. He looked at a comparison between semiconductor materials, including organics, amorphous oxides, OTFT, and he expects that “smart” objects will create a large market for organic circuits. Sharp have good overall view of the various SLA OTFT devices. He said that some conductive layers are put down by one technique, some layers by the other, there is no one single solution. Screen printing, ink-jet and gravure all play their part in additive technology. Electro-hydrodynamic printing gives five micron gaps and tracks. He concluded that for metal, gravure printing is best, for OSC it would be inkjet, and for dielectric it would be screen print.

After lunch, the conference split into four sessions. In Track 1, it was the turn of End Users of Printed Electronics to tell us about their experiences.

Dr Kate Stone, of Novalia in Cambridge, spoke on how they had become involved with the creation of interactive print in their premises on Cambridge Science Park. A physicist, she had had the vision for making products interactive, and having been given an indication from industry that such products were of interest, she went off to develop an interactive card game, and discovered that she was going to need some partnerships. In South Wales was a printing company involved with RFID, and here she became involved with the electronics side of RFID tag printing, and the spin-off from that led to Novalia, which she calls bringing art and science together. Here, there was an example of a rather clever greetings card, with LEDs in the candles, with the circuit contained within the design. If you blow on the candles, they go out. As they progressed, they found that more creativity can come from less technology, and by making a book interactive it becomes engaging. Value is in the eye of the beholder, she says, and the last five years have been an interesting journey. We thought so, too.

Dr Cristina Bertoni from Electrolux in Italy was next with a story of how they had brought printed electronics into the white goods world that they inhabit. Dr Bertoni works in their Cross-Technology and Innovation department, whose core competences cover chemistry, mechanics and electronics. Printed electronics come into the picture under various headings, one being User Interface, which includes displays; these have to be thin, flexible, have stability, and use low power. Another is RFID tags which are used in washing machines for assembly and packaging. They use semi-passive tags (Siemens Moby E) at the moment, but are looking at the use of disposable passive tags which would allow tracking and tracing right along the whole supply chain. This would lead to a reduction in internal and external costs, and an improvement in after-sales management. Another area for printed electronics was in the field of measuring water hardness and food safety. She also described an intelligent fridge that would have a display on the door showing a list of contents, and where applicable a use by date.

Thomas M. Ales III is a research scientist in product development at Kimberly-Clark Corporation and is working with low-cost conductive non-woven materials. There are four main divisions at K-C, all involved with absorbent materials. On their own account they went out to develop conductive non-woven materials, which is a conductive carbon fibre involved in the paper making process, with a 10 per cent loading. Conductive paper can be used for high-speed processing, has good electromagnetic capabilities, thermal capabilities, and some 40 Ohms/ resistivity. Thermal applications include effective heating at low cost, depending upon the loading of the carbon, as well as semi-disposable disposable heating pads, which can be used for scent release, and effective cleaning solutions. The use as a base material for RFID tags was illustrated and an indication that there is the potential to reduce RFID tag costs by 30 per cent.

Anyone who has travelled on the London Underground might have bought an Oyster card, designed to replace cash and speed up passenger movement. The company who produced the Oyster card is Cubic Transport Systems, whose President is Walter Bonneau. He spoke about the use of detection sensors for security in three specific markets – public transportation, with bomb detection being vital following recent events in Moscow and past events in London. In the field of trucking, maritime and rail transportation it was the detection of human intrusion, of explosives and radiation that was required. For aviation/airports it was the detection of explosives and the detection of radiation. All of these demands raise significant opportunities for printed electronics where sensors can be incorporated into mixed technology systems. He reflected upon the future where he saw money being spent on more resources for high volume manufacturing as opposed to R&D. The technology is far from mature, but an improving economy will provide the impetus to a “coming of age” in this respect.

To replace a speaker from the US Army, who was not allowed to travel, and at very short notice, an interesting double act was played out by Dr Juha Maijala, Manager, Intelligent Solutions, Stora Enso Packaging Boards, Finland and Mr Ramchandar Venkatesan, Manager, Innovations and Business Development R&D Ericsson, Finland. Stora are one of the world’s leading newsprint producers, and Ericsson needs no introduction, they are the largest telecom provider in the world. Between them they are working on embedded intelligence which networks everything – people, business, and society using broadband, and this enhanced connectivity can be applied to health care, transportation, logistics, being vertically integrated in each sector. Stora will be working on intelligent packaging for pharmaceuticals, for luxury packaging and for transport and logistics which included temperature logging, humidity and shock logger; secure packaging with tamper evidence, antitheft and RFID. Ericssons were providing the wireless communication systems, such as GPRS, LTE; multimedia solutions, payment and charging solutions such as IPX, wireless broadband modules (chipset) and service consulting as well as RFID. It looked complex, probably is, but doubtless was yet another step in the right direction.

Day 2 – Wednesday 14th April

Suzanne Reuter from IDTechEx stood in at very short notice indeed to talk about light emitting materials. She explained the principle construction of EL for displays, for lighting applications, which uses two electrodes and one layer of transparent material, which can be coloured. The structure of OLEDS is more complex, involving nine layers of different materials, with two architectures. OLED displays today are more commonplace, in mobile telephones, a digital picture frame or a TV, the ultimate flat panel screen. In the world of PE, 60 per cent of the drive is for products which are flexible, conformal and rollable, against 35 per cent for cost. There has been an $8 billion investment in OLED displays, but they are still ×2 to ×10 times more expensive than LCDs today, but this will change. The performance advantage over LCDs has narrowed somewhat as the $100 billion LCD juggernaut grows. However, OLED lighting this is taking off rapidly, with flexible lighting panels in R23R versions from companies such as Rogers, ITRI. Ultra thin, light and transparent OLEDS are now in being, and lend themselves superbly to contemporary design. Newer backplane technology is needed for improving performance for OLEDs; these might include LT polycrystalline silicon, and amorphous silicon. For OLEDS, flexible barrier films are urgently needed to prevent water and oxygen ingression. OLED is the hardest to protect of all, so achieve that and conquer all! The OLED market is currently worth $900 million now, and will be worth some $19 billion by 2019.

The University of Cape Town sent along Professor David Britton to talk about printing on silicon. Micro and nanoelectronics will be with us for the foreseeable future, and will be combined with printed electronics and additive technology. He compared thin film electronics to thick film for passive components. and moved into the field of printed electronics, which can be used for direct printing of active and passive devices in a circuit on any substrate, for low scale integration and for large areas. What he has developed is a system in which silicon nanoparticles are mixed with a binder to make an ink, for screen printing onto any substrate and this is a most cost effective way to print a transistor. Silicon is the most abundant element in the earth’s crust, and costs about $800 per tonne, but does need band gap engineering. Printed silicon is a lean, clean and green technology. Particle size is around 100 nm, steel or zircon ball milled for about five hours. The ink has a viscosity of 300-600 mPas, and is screen printable, defining 50 micron gaps and tracks. The transistors so produced work, and work well, as was clearly demonstrated.

From the Fujitsu Laboratories came Daiyu Kondo to talk about the synthesis of graphene and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). A CNT is a sheet of graphene rolled into a tube, and can be single or multi-walled. It is tolerant to high current density, is immensely strong, has high thermal conductivity, and a high aspect ratio. The conventional structure of a semiconductor chip can be replaced with CNTs, to give greater tolerance to high current density and higher performance with less power. To apply grapheme to electronics, direct synthesis of graphene on to the substrate is required, using the CVD (Controlled Vacuum Deposition) method in an argon gas environment. Synthesis is around 100 nm, depending upon the content in ppm and the dwell time.

He illustrated the fabrication of a graphene device with an iron deposited film forming the electrodes encapsulated with Hf02 with the graphene film within. The current density is close to that of copper, with the obvious advantages of reduced cost. CNTs offer excellent temperature stability and his company is working towards a carbon-based electronics world.

Canatu Oy is in Finland, and David Brown is their CEO. His company produce CNTs by a completely dry process. CNTs have many advantages, and he illustrated their use in flexible transparent electronics. His company have a new super-capacitance material called NanoBuds™ and CNTs and NanoBuds can be used in all manner of components. They have a process whereby the NanoBuds can be deposited on all manner of rigid and flexible substrates, and an image created with high capacitance and a wide range of resistivity, up to 1,000 Ω/. Adhesion on PET is excellent; on glass one would need an adhesive layer. What they make is pre-printed imaged films to customer requirement. Simple, low cost, high yield, environmentally friendly, high quality scalable production with CNTs is now possible. This paper attracted a great deal of attention from the audience.

Dr Flora Li from the University of Cambridge came to talk to us about zinc-oxide TFTs produced at low temperature. The Rise of Metal Oxide Electronics was the title of her paper. Transparent flexible displays and sensors, interactive surfaces, transparent solar cells, smart windows. ITO back in 2007 formed the start, and then came TFTs and solar cells as the 2nd generation, and the 3rd generation of transparent electronics through to 2015 will be transparency in many things. Transparent metal oxides give lower deposition temperatures which is good, as are low manufacturing costs, a wide band gap and relatively high carrier mobility.

She compared the various deposition techniques for metal oxide thin films, and concluded that the HiTUS technique was superior. HiTUS was explained: Sputtering has been around for some time, High Target Utilisation Sputtering changes the way that the plasma density is applied through independent control and by using zinc oxide, merged in various percentages with other metals such as indium. This results in a wide conductivity range, either highly resistive or highly conductive. It is optically transparent in the visible regime. Zinc tin oxide, as opposed to indium zinc oxide, has shown better results, however, ZnSnO is under study, but ZnO/Cu20 solar cells look good. More news is awaited.

Dr Peer Löbmann is the Senior Scientist at the Fraunhofer ISC in Dresden and he spoke about pad printing of 2-D structured ITO films. As well as plasma printing of 3-D TCOs (transparent conductive oxides). 2-D structured TCOs have a TCO on the substrate, then they apply a photo resist, expose, develop and etch, as a standard subtractive process. The sol-gel system is where the amorphous coating is pad printed using ITO with PVC pads, and you can apply on contoured surfaces. Resolution is 10-20 mm. The result is an OLED for lighting. For metal TCO architectures, they use plasma printing on a roll to roll system.. A patterned ignition of a plasma provides the etched image to the surface of the film, which is then copper plated though immersion plating. It is an effective methodology.

Hewlett-Packard Labs are working on roll to roll processing of very small structures in partnership with Power Films Inc, said Dr Warren Jackson. There are many applications for large inexpensive flexible electronics MEMs, electronic wallpaper, etc. But it is large-scale, where cost and yield are important. R2R imprint lithography –called SAIL is self-aligned imprint lithography, the printing roller having a raised image imparting an instant UV cure. R2R deposition of oxides is done by a sliding control, followed by either plasma etching, or roll-to-roll wet etching. R2R inspection is optical, but roll-to-roll testing is more difficult, and proving hard nut to crack. Defects can include dust particles, oxide pinholes, imprint stamp breakage, air entrapment. Finished SAIL structures are versatile, and offer a full array of features. A zinc tin oxide array was also shown, he emphasised that for fine features gravure printing is probably the best option.

Stan Farnsworth is the VP Marketing at NovaCentrix who are based in Austin, Texas. A spin-off from the University of Texas, they specialise in nanoparticles, specifically printing inks, and the curing processes, required for printed electronics in its purest sense. They produce copper oxide and silver inks t their own formulation, and have a unique curing process that essentially sinters the ink into a dry film in milliseconds at temperatures up to 1,000°C without any detrimental effect to the substrate, which can be PET-based for flexible R2R production of, say, RFID tags. The availability of such a printing process, which substantially reduces the cost of producing products like tags is a welcome step forward, and Stan described the process in considerable detail. This was fully supported by a working demonstration in the Exhibition Hall. Their Metalon® inks are available in various media, one being an HP cartridge for an ink-jet printer so that prototypes can be produced quickly and easily. In production other formats are used. The copper ink does require a barrier to prevent oxidation but then they are not using pure copper, but the conductivity obtained is not far short of that achieved by silver. That they were the recipients of the IDTechEx Award Winner at this event is hardly surprising.

Dr Bernhard Sailer is the Global Marketing Manager of Huntsman Advanced Materials. He explained how, with their partners from the Fast2Light Consortium, Holst Centre/TNOP and Philips Research Laboratories, they are developing device encapsulation technology to protect OLEDs from environmental impact, prolonging their lifetime and enabling flexible OLED lighting. This is achieved by thin film encapsulation based on organic/inorganic layers, namely SiN-OCP-SiN as a barrier film, and this has been shown to have eliminated black spots caused by ingression of humidity. SiN will need to impart an intrinsic WVTR (Water Vapour Transmission Rate) of 10−6 gsm per day for a ten year lifetime.

Dr Daniel Lenssen is the Business Development Manager at DELO Industrial Adhesives, who are located in Bavaria. His company, who devote much of their sales turnover to R&D, is successful, and have come through the recession with increased sales revenue on the strength of having good, young products. They manufacture sealants, and he set out to answer the question – how do you protect moisture and oxygen sensitive devices such as OLEDs, eReaders etc? Given that the top and bottom have glass or barrier films over them, he looked at the adhesive in the frame. The sealant used here shows many things that need care. They have found that sealant compatibility with OLED materials is essential when used in large format OLEDs, and control of water content is essential. They have developed DELOLUX 20/400 as the light source for curing sealants along the adhesives in the frames. Getting the WVTR right is critical here, and DELO join Huntsman in providing answers to OLED life longevity questions.

Atlas MTT material testing solutions have Andreas Riedl to thank for setting out their PV solar energy testing programme in such a way as to make it comprehensible. Andreas described what characterised an environmental durability test method, and explained the differences between IEC test programmes and weathering testing. How one can simulate PV accelerated ageing was described, and what properties change from primary and secondary weather factors. They take a multi-disciplinary approach, involving physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics and this ensures that no aspect remains uncovered.

Mr Markku Känsäkoski of VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland described the formation of a large team who would be working towards the completion of a project involving gas sensors on flexible substrates for wireless applications. It has a name – FlexSmell – which involves biosensors mounted on flexible substrates which use RFID tags to provide the wireless read-out. The idea is to have such sensors monitoring indoor air quality, and to smell gas when it is evident. The same system can also be applied to food freshness and quality traceability control after packaging. It combines many technologies, and combines the efforts of many people, in the realms of academia, engineering, industry, and graduates and post-Doctorate students. It involves many institutions including Manchester and Sheffield Universities, the Holst Centre, Carton Pack in Italy, and is aimed at training young researchers in a specific project with a definitive purpose. VTT already have a sensor to measure gas, this is based on gravure printed WO2 nanoparticle layer as the sensor, and they possess excellent in-house R2R facilities for the industrialisation of gas sensors. www.flexsmell.eu is the web site to go to for full details. It should be an interesting project.

Dr Steve Beeby of the University of Southampton was the sole advocate of energy harvesting at this event, and shared with us the story of the work being done in his department for screen printed piezoelectric energy harvesting. It was a classic story of effort=achievement, and his aim to achieve a source of energy which would replace or augment a battery had been realised. They have used screen printing as a low cost batch fabrication process to create printed electrodes using silver palladium and/or silver polymer as piezoelectric material. This is printed onto the arm of a cantilever which moves up and down when excited at the base, and as the piezoelectric is stretched so it causes the charge. With some clever circuitry design and a condenser, the charge can be stored. Initial results were not at all bad, but they experimented with ball milling the silver conductive medium, and in the end found that they were achieving a good 240 μW (5 V) from a card placed in the tailfin of a small helicopter. Further work will be for fixed wing application. www.eh-network.org for those who wish to learn more of this invaluable work.

Dr Richard Trew is the Divisional Director of the National Scientific Foundation in the USA. The NSF has an annual budget of $5.6 billion for research, and is run by dedicated people who are non-politically appointed, and they cover seven distinct disciplines. $618 million is available for engineering. PV continues to be of great interest to the NSF, as are optoelectronics, inorganics, hybrid devices, and hybrid circuits. Also included are flexible hybrid electronics, with application to energy, electronics, biomedical and healthcare, communications, and to a lesser extent, defence.

Within the PE world they have about 195 projects running taking up some $100 million which gives an average per project of some $300,000 over three years. Research into photonics, optoelectronics, and energy related flexible solar cell technology is “hot” at the moment. Dr Trew informed us that there will be a staggering 470 per cent increase in solar cell power generation between 2010 and 2020, but interfacing with the national grid is a real challenge. In five years time 17,000 MW will be generated by solar cell technology.

Richard Kirk is the Chairman of PolyPhotonix in the UK. It would be insufficient to say that his company make OLEDs. His company can turn their hand to manufacturing almost anything that involves light, and as a trained artist Richard is of the belief that it is artists and designers who can visualise the way in which plastic electronics can be employed in the most original and effective ways, not just lighting engineers. He was thus delighted to see that amongst the hundreds of delegates, many were designers. He was slightly surprised to see that the use of electro-luminescence was making a come back, but he is an OLED man, and he was enthusiastic about the ways in which OLEDs are now being used to illuminate buildings, in the hands of contemporary designers, and he emphasised that when it comes to energy savings, OLED has no peer. The LCD camp is putting up a spirited fight, and the level of investment in LCDs may be having success in the TV world and for posters, but OLEDs have their place.

Dr Laurence Hogg is the Network Manager at Faraday Packaging in the UK. An adjunct to Leeds University, Faraday is the fount of all FMCG knowledge and they have a client list of the great and the good as long as your arm. Faraday knows their clients jobs, and their need for knowledge, and have a deep understanding of the latest academic research. When it comes to printed electronics, there tend to be two questions from their clients:

  1. 1.

    Good, but what will I do with it?

  2. 2.

    Will the consumers benefit?

There is a gap here between the consumer industry where there are rules, and printed electronics, where there are none. No one can foresee how consumers will react; no one is prepared to invest in case they react badly. But the situation is interesting – the brand owners have effectively lost their voice, their control has gone. The power is in the hands of the consumers, as illustrated by the increasing use of the internet and the notice that consumers take of reviews.

Trip Advisor is one case in point. So, communications are the key. Dr Hogg mentioned an “ambient internet” where consumers are on line, all the time, and where consumers sell to other consumers. Here, semi-smart interactive packs with a mobile “phone will be in use. Consumers want a good experience, and by understanding that it is possible to design the experience. How they arrive at that experience might be down a different road to the one they are used to, but it will be on their terms for a change.

IDTechEx are past masters at this sort of event. One is unaware of any other organisation that has driven technologies to market with quite the panache and sheer competence that IDTechEx have over the past years. It is hardly any wonder that attendance is up by 40 per cent, the global interest and innate curiosity is well-served by the showcase that they manage, several times a year, in many different countries, in various formats, and with outstanding speakers from all the disciplines involved.

The next Printed Electronics Europe Conference & Exhibition will be in Düsseldorf on 4th and 5th April 2011.

J.H. LingAssociate Editor

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