CAMBRIDGE, UK – What do electronic skin patches, thin-film flexible photovoltaics and automotive interior consoles have in common? All are produced using printed & flexible electronics, an alternative approach to conventional printed circuit boards that combines additive manufacturing with flexible substrates. Bringing benefits such as rapid prototyping, improved sustainability, scope for form factor differentiation and even stretchability, printed & flexible electronics is gaining traction across an extremely diverse range of applications.
IDTechEx's new report "Flexible & Printed Electronics 2023-2033: Forecasts, Technologies, Markets" provides a comprehensive overview of what can seem a bewilderingly broad topic. By summarizing IDTechEx's extensive printed/flexible electronics report portfolio and drawing on years of following this developing industry, the report outlines innovations, opportunities, and trends across 5 sectors of the printed and flexible electronics market: automotive, consumer goods, energy, healthcare/wellness, and infrastructure/buildings/industrial. This analysis includes granular forecasts of 50 distinct applications and 40 detailed company profiles.
Additionally, the report outlines developments across multiple underlying technologies: 6 distinct manufacturing modalities (including in-mold electronics and flexible hybrid electronics), 5 material types (including conductive inks and component attachment materials), and 4 component types (including flexible ICs). Multiple recent examples, acquired from interviews and industry conferences, show technology development directions and successful commercialization. Assessments of technological and commercial readiness, along with additional forecasts for manufacturing methods and conductive inks, are also included.
Application Opportunities
As with conventional PCBs, printed & flexible electronics has applications across most market verticals. For example, electronic skin patches utilizing conductive inks for electrodes and contacts are already available, as are printed pressure-sensitive insoles for gait monitoring. Conformality lends itself to automotive interiors, where printed/flexible electronics is utilized for lighting, heating and touch-sensitive interfaces. Organic photovoltaics is seeing a renaissance, with recent commercial examples including both building integration and indoor energy harvesting. Sensors based on printed electronics for asset tracking and preventative maintenance promise low production costs novel form factors to suit specific requirements.
Innovations
Printed & flexible electronics represents a fundamentally different approach to manufacturing, replacing subtractive removal of laminated copper with additive deposition of conductive ink. This reduces waste and facilitates digital manufacturing with the associated benefits of rapid prototyping and straightforward design adjustments. The report evaluates a range of manufacturing innovations and their prospects, ranging from fully additive 3D electronics to in-mold electronics and emerging digital printing methods with resolutions as small as 1 μm.
Material innovations underpin many emerging hardware technologies, and printed electronics is no exception. Conductive inks underpin the technology, with dozens of companies developing inks with a range of compositions and attributes. Viscous silver-flake-based ink for screen printing dominates, but alternatives such as nano-particle and particle-free inks are gaining traction for specific applications such as EMI shielding. An especially notable trend is the development of copper ink, which promises a substantial cost reduction over its silver counterparts. Other specialized materials include ultra-low temperature solder and field-aligned anisotropic conductive adhesives enable components such as LEDs to be securely attached to cheaper, thermally fragile substrates. Furthermore, many sensors require specialist materials, such as printable piezoelectric polymers for vibration sensing and functionalized carbon nanotubes for ion detection.
While the original vision for printed and flexible electronics was to print every aspect of the circuit, including the integrated circuit, this has largely been supplanted by flexible hybrid electronics (FHE), which combines printed and mounted functionality. As such, there is an opportunity for natively flexible integrated circuits, batteries, and displays.
Building on Expertise
IDTechEx has been researching developments in the printed and flexible electronics market for well over a decade. Since then, we have stayed close to technical and commercial developments, interviewing key players worldwide, annually attending conferences such as FLEX and LOPEC, delivering multiple consulting projects, and running classes/ workshops on the topic. "Flexible & Printed Electronics 2023-2033: Forecasts, Technologies, Markets" utilizes this experience and expertise to summarize IDTechEx's knowledge and insight across the entire field.
To find out more, including downloadable sample pages, please visit www.IDTechEx.com/PE
Upcoming Free-to-Attend Webinar Printed and Flexible Electronics: State of the Industry
An introduction to printed and flexible electronics, including motivating factors
Assessment of product-market fit across the application space, including discussion of use cases seeing most commercial traction
A selection of recent innovations spanning materials, components, and manufacturing methods
A roadmap for how the industry will develop, spanning both technologies and applications
There will be a Q&A session at the end of this webinar, where Dr Dyson will answer a few questions that have been sent in. Please send your questions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by Friday 7th July. Please note that there will not be time to answer all of the questions sent in.
Click here to register your place on one of our three sessions. If you are unable to make the date, please register anyway to receive the links to the on-demand recording and slides as soon as they are available!
CAMBRIDGE, UK – Anyone who has used a 'smart lens' app on their smartphone is familiar with machine vision. Rather than simply reproducing and storing a picture for later viewing, machine vision applies an image processing algorithm to obtain additional insight, such as locating edges or object identification. While few would regard a 'smart lens' app as essential, machine vision is a critical component of many industrial processes, such as material sorting and quality control. It is also crucial for ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) and, ultimately, autonomous vehicles.
Embedded vision brings these computational capabilities to the 'edge'. Rather than images being sent from a sensor to a central processor, initial analysis is performed adjacent to the sensor on a dedicated, often application-specific, processor. This greatly reduces data transmission requirements since rather than sending all the acquired information (i.e., each pixel's intensity over time), only the conclusions (e.g., object locations) are transmitted. The combination of reduced data transmission and application-specific processing also reduces latency, enabling quicker system responses.
Minimizing Size, Weight, and Power (SWAP)
While in many image sensing applications maximizing performance metrics such as resolution and dynamic range is the priority, sensors for embedded vision are typically designed with other priorities in mind. Collected data needs to be good enough to meet the requirements of the image processing algorithm, but since the picture will not be seen, then maximizing image quality is somewhat redundant. Instead, the aim is to make the system as light and compact as possible while minimizing power requirements. This SWAP reduction enables more sensors to be deployed in devices with size and weight constraints, such as drones, while also reducing associated costs. As such, small image sensors are typically deployed, often those originally developed for smartphones. Over time, expect to see greater integration, such as stacking the sensing and processing functionalities.
Miniaturized Spectral Sensing
Embedded vision isn't restricted to conventional image sensors that detect RGB pixels in the visible range. Monochromatic sensing will likely suffice for simpler algorithms, such as edge detection for object location, reducing sensor cost. Alternatively, using more sophisticated sensors with additional capabilities arguably supports the essence of embedded vision by minimizing subsequent processing requirements.
Adding spectral resolution to image sensors can expedite subsequent processing for applications such as material identification, since the additional spectral dimension generally means a smaller training data set is required. However, meeting the SWAP requirements of most embedded vision systems is challenging for many spectral sensors due to their bulky architectures housing diffractive optics. Emerging approaches aiming to resolve this challenge include MEMS (micro electromechanical systems) spectrometers, increasing optical path length using photonic chips, and adding multiple narrow bandwidth spectral filters to image sensors using conventional semiconductor manufacturing techniques.
Event-Based Vision
Another sensing approach that aims to minimize subsequent processing requirements is event-based vision. Rather than acquiring images at a constant frame rate, with event-based vision, each pixel reports timestamps that correspond to intensity changes. As such, these sensors combine greater temporal resolution of rapidly changing regions with far less data from static background regions, thus reducing data transfer and subsequent processing requirements. Furthermore, because each pixel acts independently, the dynamic range is increased. Crucially, this alternative acquisition approach is occurring within the sensing chip, not with post-processing algorithms, enabling an associated embedded vision system to be simpler since it has less data to handle.
Further Insights
The adoption of embedded vision systems will continue to grow as more devices gain autonomous capabilities, with robotics, industrial vision, and vehicles as the dominant markets. This represents an opportunity not just for compact image sensors, optics, and processing ICs, but also for emerging sensor types such as spectral imaging and event-based vision that can reduce processing requirements and thus support embedded vision's value proposition of reducing size, weight, power, and latency.
IDTechEx's report "Emerging Image Sensor Technologies 2023-2033: Applications and Markets" explores a diverse range of image sensing technologies capable of resolutions and wavelength detection far beyond what is currently attainable. This includes the spectral and event-based sensing outlined here, but also InGaAs alternatives for short-wave infrared (SWIR) imaging, thin film photodetectors, perovskite photodetectors, wavefront imaging, and more. Many of these emerging technologies are expected to gain traction across sectors, including robotics, industrial imaging, healthcare, biometrics, autonomous driving, agriculture, chemical sensing, and food inspection.
CHANDLER, AZ – Rogers Corporation (NYSE:ROG) announced Technical Marketing Manager, John Coonrod, will give two presentations June 14th in the MicroApps Theater at the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) in San Diego, CA. Topics include “3D Printed RF Structures Open the Potential to Think Out of the Box” and “Thermal Stability Consistency is Even More Important at Millimeter-Wave Frequencies.”
In addition, Rogers will be showcasing its products in Booth #1635 during IMS, the world’s largest RF and Microwave show, which takes place from Tues., June 13th - Thurs., June 15th . These products include Radix™ 3D Printable Dielectrics and new Anteo™ low loss laminates.
Rogers new family of Anteo laminates is designed to offer low loss RF performance as an alternative to FR-4 in commercial and consumer applications. With a dielectric constant of 4.07 +/- 0.08 and a dissipation factor of .005 at 10 GHz, Anteo laminates offer two benefits in comparison to thicker grades of FR-4. For a comparable price, it offers superior performance and enables greater antenna gain and efficiency. But the lower dissipation factor also enables similar or marginally improved performance at 1/3 rd to ½ the thickness of FR-4, thus providing a significant cost savings and improvement in packaging.
Radix ™ 3D Printable Dielectric, is the first 3D material featuring a dielectric constant of 2.8 and low loss characteristics at microwave frequencies. These printable dielectric materials give radio frequency (RF) designers unprecedented design freedom in creating new components, eliminating the need to consider typical manufacturing design constraints.
Rogers Corporation’s Radix 3D Printable Dielectric is a proprietary composite material designed for Digital Light Processing (DLP) 3D printing, enabling a scalable, high-resolution printing process for end- use RF dielectric component manufacturing. This printable dielectric material has a targeted dielectric constant of 2.8 and a dissipation factor of 0.0043 at 10 GHz when cured.
The material is intended for use as RF material in applications where new geometric freedom can enhance the figure of merits of an RF system, such as gradient dielectric constant (GRIN) structures and other complex three-dimensional parts. The Radix 3D Printable Dielectric offers the industry a way to manufacture systems and components at scale that could not be made with traditional fabrication methods. Radix materials are available directly from Rogers Corporation and our 3D printing partners. Learn more about Radix 3D Printable Dielectrics: View Video
SUZHOU, CHINA – Ventec International Group Co., Ltd. (TWSE:6672.TT), will be exhibiting at the International Microwave Symposium 2023 in San Diego from June 13-15. On booth 2343, Ventec will be showcasing its unique range of PCB laminates and prepreg materials for high-end RF and microwave applications - all supported by a fast and efficient global delivery promise through Ventec's fully controlled and managed global supply chain and world-class dependable technical support.
Ventec’s tec-speed range comprises an enhanced set of high-performance, high-reliability, and high-frequency solutions developed for the demands of the RF and microwave industries. At the exhibition, visitors will be invited to explore the latest additions to the central tec-speed 20.0 range, including:
New VTM-1000i, Ventec’s latest hydrocarbon laminate with excellent thermal reliability and incredibly high Dk (9.8) and low Df (0.0023). VTM-1000i represents the top-tier option for use with satellite communications systems, GPS antennas, and other RF and microwave circuitry.
New VT-870 L330x, a low-cost hydrocarbon solution for mmWave radar with 3.25 Dk and 0.0030 Df, designed specifically for use with automotive radar designs.
Further high-speed, low-loss materials highlighted at the booth include:
tec-speed 30.0 – Ventec’s ceramic-filled PTFE material range is designed for high-speed/high-frequency applications. It offers the highest signal-integrity characteristics to offer premium quality for the most advanced systems, such the demanding arena of 77~79 GHz automotive radar.
tec-thermal - The tec-thermal range comprises Ventec's IMS (Insulated Metal Substrate) families, laminates and prepregs for multilayer PCBs specifically developed for excellent thermal performance. Experts will be available at the exhibition to discuss the range of innovative formulas that features:
VT-4B5 SP - an aluminum base laminate that ensures maximum thermal efficiency for direct-to-metal connections of electrically isolated heat sources and places dielectric insulation only where needed.
VT-4B5L - a high-performance IMS material that offers excellent solder joint reliability and thermal conductivity of 3.6 W/mK.
Ventec’s range of laminates and prepregs include product lines optimized for superior signal integrity and high-speed digital applications, RF and analog circuits, thermally enhanced materials including insulated metal substrate (IMS) technology, and an advanced range of thermal management solutions. The company serves customers across the globe, active in industries including automotive, communication, aerospace, and defense. Further information about Ventec’s solutions and the company’s wide variety of products is available at www.venteclaminates.com
CHANDLER, AZ – Isola Group is inviting the RF/microwave industry to find more practical circuit material solutions at the upcoming 2023 IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS) exhibition. Welcoming visitors to the San Diego Convention Center (San Diego, CA) for the industry’s largest annual RF/microwave conference and exhibition during June 13-15, 2023, Isola Group is offering a sampling of its extensive lines of laminates and prepreg materials for RF, microwave, millimeter-wave (mmWave), and photonics circuits. Representatives from Isola Group will be on hand at exhibition booth #2235 to discuss design strategies, manufacturing methods, material testing, and how to find the best circuit material for that special project, no matter how high in frequency. Isola’s team has tackled a wide range of applications, from ADAS automotive radars to satellite communications (satcom) receivers, and they look forward to exploring how their materials might satisfy your circuit requirements.
As the RF/microwave industry moves higher in frequency, in almost all markets including commercial, industrial, medical, and military/aerospace business, circuit materials serve as foundations and starting points for higher-frequency circuits. Those materials must transfer signals with smaller wavelengths and do so with as little loss as possible. Circuit materials for RF and microwave circuits have long provided the characteristics needed for critical applications, including electronic warfare (EW) and radar systems. But with more systems reaching for available channels and bandwidths at mmWave frequencies, the circuit materials must exhibit outstanding thermal behavior and excellent dielectric stability to minimize performance variations at mmWave frequencies. The circuit materials on display from Isola Group offer the characteristics and performance needed for repeatable mmWave circuits, and they have the chemistry that makes them extremely manufacturable, even for those fine circuit features needed at microwave, mmWave, and even photonic wavelengths.
One of those materials is Astra® MT77, available in laminate and prepreg forms. The circuit materials are characterized by a low dielectric constant (Dk) of 3.00 as measured through its thickness or z-axis at 10 GHz. The material has extremely low loss when used for printed- circuit boards (PCBs) at high frequencies, denoted by a dissipation factor (Df) of 0.0017 at 10 GHz. It maintains consistent electrical and mechanical attributes across wide operating temperature ranges in support of commercial and military applications at mmWave frequencies, including automotive ADAS radars and airborne radar systems.
Tachyon® 100G laminates and prepregs feature the electrical and mechanical traits that make them strong building blocks for high-speed-digital (HSD) circuits. They are similar in behavior to Astra® MT77, with Dk of 3.02 through the z-axis at 10 GHz and Df of 0.0021 at 10 GHz. But they are tailored for HSD circuits operating at speeds of 100 Gb/s and more. And they exhibit thermal behavior closely matched to Astra® MT77, as evidenced by their similar coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) values for a wide operating temperature range of -55 to +125°C. The thermal compatibility makes Astra® MT77 and Tachyon® 100G laminates and prepregs good candidates for hybrid PCBs, where one material holds RF/microwave circuits and the other handles HSD circuits.
Isola Group will also be showing its halogen-free materials at the 2023 IEEE IMS exhibition, with example circuits on its TerraGreen® laminates and TerraGreen® 400G laminates and prepregs. TerraGreen® features a Dk of 3.45 in the z-axis of the material at 10 GHz with Df of 0.0031 also at 10 GHz. TerraGreen® 400G laminates and prepregs exhibit lower Dk of 3.05 in the z-axis at 10 GHz and lower Df of 0.0018 at 10 GHz for outstanding performance in ultra-high-speed digital circuits requiring halogen-free circuit materials.
The materials are different but work well together and Isola Group’s representatives welcome visitors to the booth wishing to learn more about designing and manufacturing with the various circuit materials. Those not attending the 2023 IMS can find more information on any of these materials at the Isola Group website at www.isola-group.com
OSLO, NORWAY – CONFIDEE is proud to announce the appointment of Patrick Sandberg as Sales Manager Germany. The expansion to Germany is aligned with CONFIDEE's growth strategy, which is to strengthen its global presence with domestic languages to be closely involved in the partners' demands and monitor their global electronic supply chain.
“We are excited to have Patrick onboard. Germany is an important market to us. With Patrick as part of our team, with his, + 20 years of PCB experience, we are well equipped and committed to provide German customers with compliant and innovative PCB solutions, while delivering exceptional and personal customer service and support”, says CEO Vidar Olsen.
CONFIDEE's focus on the compliant reporting and monitoring of data in the PCB supply chain, is already noticed in the industry. By expanding to Germany, the company aims to further strengthen its position as a trusted partner for businesses seeking transparent, secure and efficient PCB supply chain solutions.
“I am honored to be part of the company and excited to help and support the business in Germany. CONFIDEEs strength is in my opinion, their focus on transparency, building relationships and treating all aspects of business with a fair and personal touch. All this, combined with a holistic approach to data protection, mitigating the risks of security breaches in the PCB supply chain, is hard to counter”, says Sandberg.
“I have worked in the German PCB industry for several decades. I personally know that data security and safeguarding the integrity of supply chains, by providing innovative solutions that meet stringent PCB requirements, is crucial to be a valued partner in the German market,” Sandberg says.
