Production Technologies for Large Area Flexible Electronics

There is a wide variety of printed large area flexible electronic devices and at the same time a number of different visions and estimates for this new emerging industry and market. But as every new industry or technology, printed electronics has to overcome technology red brick walls, survive the valley of death for the start ups and spin offs and be competitive enough against existing technologies, like silicon technologies. The talk wants to give a broad picture on these new products and describes the potential market outlook. Then the talk tries to give a definition of common characteristics for printed electronics and the potential of not only single printed devices, but for integrated products which can consist of only printed devices or a mix of printed and silicone devices. Out of the broad picture the talk focuses then on how to scale up processes from lab to fab, from the view of an equipment maker being in high tech developing markets like fuel cells, lithium ion batteries and solar for more than fifteen years. From this overview the talk then gets more detailed into needed processes, parameters, printing systems, laser scribing, nano-imprint and coating systems. The next chapter describes the equipment solutions of today and tomorrow, which is the effort to give the existing state of the art of technology resulting of being in this market since ten years and the outlook into large scale factory solutions.