The Future Is Bright for Printed Electronics

Endowing your average food package or beverage with electronics designed to monitor its temperature and store other useful information about the product seems a thing of the future at this point in time, but researchers worldwide, who are currently working on ways to print circuits directly on their substrate, ensure us that the future might be closer then we think.

The first successful print job has already been done, featuring special printers that embed a circuit pattern directly onto a sheet of fabric, without having to go through the cumbersome process of photolithography, which implies big costs and a very complex method of production, where circuits are created by exposure to light in intricate patterns.

Moreover, while the latter technique yields very tangible results, in the form of flat screen TVs and other such commodities, they are unsuited for use on a small scale, for instance for temperature monitoring and other such tasks, for the simple reason that they cost too much.

On the other hand, so do the printed circuits, but scientists in charge of various research programs say that, as soon as viable printing methods are devised, they expect the prices for this type of electronics, based mostly on polymer alloys covered in nanoparticles, to drop 50 percent under that of silicon-based materials.

“We expect printed products to cost around 50 percent less than silicon-based ones, in the case of simple circuits. Printed RFID tags should then be cheap enough to be attached to the packaging of low-cost products such as yogurts, where they can then monitor the temperature, and store and transmit data,” Dr. Michael Jank, Fraunhofer Institute of Integrated Systems and Device Technology IISB group manager, says. “We use ink made of nanoparticles and add a stabilizer, so that the particles can be easily processed and do not clump together.”