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

Dr Matthew Dyson, Principal Technology Analyst at IDTechEx and author of this report, will be presenting a webinar on the topic on Wednesday 12 July 2023 - Printed and Flexible Electronics: State of the Industry.

This webinar will discuss the following topics:

• 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 a.garrington@IDTechEx.com 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!

MANASSAS, VA – ZESTRON, the leading global provider of high-precision cleaning products, services, and training solutions in the electronics manufacturing and semiconductor industries, is pleased to announce an upcoming webinar on “Enhancing Performance of Copper Pillar Interconnects through Defluxing”. The webinar will take place on June 15, 2023, at 2:00 PM EST and will be presented by Ravi Parthasarathy, Senior Application Engineer at ZESTRON Americas.

During this webinar, Ravi Parthasarathy will provide an in-depth analysis of the effectiveness of pure DI-water and a novel low-concentration cleaning agent in removing flux residues from copper pillar interconnects with 150µm bump pitch and 30µm Cu pillar height. A comparative assessment will be reviewed which was performed utilizing several analytical/functional test methodologies based on the latest IPC and JEDEC standards.

This webinar is part of the ZESTRON Academy Advanced Packaging and Power Electronics: A Webinar Series on the Latest Innovations, Cleaning, and Corrosion Challenges. Participants will have the opportunity to gain insights from a leading expert in precision cleaning solutions and learn about the latest innovations, techniques, and strategies for enhancing the performance and reliability of advanced packaging and power electronics.

Register now to secure your spot and learn more about Enhancing Performance of Copper Pillar Interconnects through Defluxing.

CHINO, CA – Scienscope International is excited to announce plans to exhibit at the SMTA Queretaro Expo & Tech Forum in Mexico on Thursday, July 13, 2023. As a prominent supplier of cabinet-style micro-focus X-ray systems in the United States, Scienscope offers a range of solutions for the production process. The Scienscope team looks forward to showcasing the company’s advanced inspection equipment and discussing Component Management, X-ray Inspection and Optical Inspection Solutions.

Scienscope’s local sales representative, Mario Montaño, will be available during the show to answer any questions regarding the company’s solutions, while Cesar Martinez will be available to discuss Optical Inspection Solutions.

Scienscope International understands the demanding requirements of modern electronics manufacturing and the company designs products to provide unparalleled precision, speed, and accuracy in detecting defects and anomalies in critical components. As a one-stop solution provider for warehouse automation, machine vision, and X-ray and optical inspection, Scienscope offers customization based on your facility's needs. Scienscope component counters can save you time and money, reduce labor, and avoid "line down" scenarios due to a lack of components.

Visit Scienscope International at the SMTA Queretaro Expo & Tech Forum to learn more about its state-of-the-art systems and find out how Scienscope International can help improve your production process. For further information, please email Scienscope at info@scienscope.com, call 1-909-590-7273, or visit www.scienscope.com

HAWTHORNE, CA – OSI Optoelectronics, a global leader in the design, development, and manufacturing of high-performance standard and custom silicon and InGaAs photodetectors, announces a broad expansion of optoelectronic solutions. The new products and services include rigid flex board and flex circuit design, manufacturing, and assembly for the most rigorous OEM specifications.

OSI’s turnkey solutions include flexible printed circuits, product-quality prototyping, ultrahigh-density designs, high-density interconnects, long-length flex circuits, box builds, surface-mount technology (SMT), cable harnesses, multilayered designs, high- and low-temperature dielectrics, hybrid solutions, flying probe, universal grid designs, lasers, LEDs, and value-added assemblies. These unique offers are scalable solutions that add value to original equipment manufacturers and prime contractors.

The company, known for its wide variety of photodetectors for medical, military, aerospace, telecommunications, semiconductor, industrial, life sciences, and consumer electronics, now provides customized, reliable optoelectronic components, electronic modules, and complex assemblies to meet the growing needs of its OEM customer base.

According to Steve Cuffel, vice president of sales and marketing, “Our custom optical sensor and detection solutions provide exceptional performance that can also be scaled up to meet the demands of any project. Our enhanced capabilities allow us to provide innovative solutions to fulfill ever-evolving OEM requirements. We continue to expand our portfolio, bringing together our company’s OEM products and services, offering them under one consolidated supplier, OSI Optoelectronics.”

To learn more about OSI’s OEM custom solutions, visit www.osioptoelectronics.com