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Tracking printed electronics' latest manufacturing moves |
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Apr 24, 2007 at 09:43 AM |
One of the micro/nano sectors I've been tracking this year is the flexible, printed, and organic electronics industry, or FPO.
Another acronym TOP (for "thin film, organic, and printed") also gets some play. My latest news story on FPO/TOP posted earlier today on www.smalltimes.com, in which I write about the recent development agreements between Thin Film Electronics (TFE), a Norwegian/Swedish R&D company with an intriguing nonvolatile polymer memory technology (developed in conjunction with Intel), and Soligie, a printed electronics foundry in Minnesota, and Xaar, a UK-based inkjet tech company. The goal of the respective deals is to get TFE's flexible memories into volume production by 2008.
While other FPO manufacturing efforts have focused on displays and sensors, TFE and its partners are the first to push a plastic memory technology toward manufacturability. For more perspective on this deal and the sector in general, check out Lawrence Gasman's recent posting on his TOP Blog at nanomarkets.net.
In related news, the U.S. Display Consortium's FPO initiative has launched its own Website, www.fpoelectronics.org. Admittedly, the site is a work in progress with some design and linkage bugs to be worked out. But it has the potential to be an important online gathering place for an emerging industry with tremendous medium- and long-term upside, as reflected in the site's slogan: "electronics on the human scale." I do have one immediate suggestion for the FPO site's webmaster: choose something other than the combination of yellow type on a white background to display that slogan!
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