Printing The Electronic Future By Dr. Peter Harrop, IDTechEx

Globally the printing industry is in decline. Are the centuries of sophisticated development of the science and production technology for printing declining in a whimper? The answer is probably not. Certainly there is a fascinating escape route opening up for some. It is the printing of electronics.

In the USA, much of the printing industry is in free fall as a result of the internet and changing lifestyles. For example, the young prefer television, the i-pod and the computer to the newspaper or magazine. There is some growth in sectors of the packaging industry such as polyester packaging and in the labelling industry in the form of self-adhesive labels but neither of these industries is particularly prosperous either. Printing spans them all. For example, only 5% of barcodes are created in the form of labels any more. Instead of the label industry providing a barcode applied to packaging and products, the barcode is now printed directly at almost zero cost when other printing takes place. Feeble pickings there for the industry.

So are the centuries of sophisticated development of the science and production technology for printing ending in a whimper? Are the ink makers, machinery suppliers and others variously specialising in flexo, litho, ink jet, screen, gravure and other technologies looking like the steam engine experts of one hundred years ago? The answer is probably not. Certainly there is a fascinating escape route opening up for some. It is the printing of electronics.

The argument goes like this. The silicon chip is the clever bit of almost everything electronic. It subsumes transistors, diodes and many other small components and the myriad of wires, connections and therefore failure modes previously involved. By making the features on the chip smaller and smaller, more and more complexity can be provided with little or no increase in cost. However, the silicon chip has subsumed all it can and that means that it has to be connected in the good old fashioned way to large components such as displays, batteries, actuators, antennas and even the larger capacitors and resistors. This is all with added cost and plenty of failure modes in the interconnects. Indeed, the size of the finished device exhibits no benefit from the smallness of the chip and that may mean it is too large for the required purpose such as smart packaging.