Printing of electronics is an escape route opening up for some in the troubled printing industry. 

It involves many passes of very different new inks such as fine  silver conductors, ceramic dielectrics, copper doped phosphors, and both organic and inorganic semiconductors and passivation layers. It uses improvements to many different printing technologies and it will be an industry of hundreds of billions of dollars yearly within twenty years, creating from disposable ubiquitous lighting and electronics, moving colour billboards, wallpaper television, electronic books and more. 

This article originally appeared in Global SMT & Packaging magazine 6.3 - Mar 2006.

Download the full article (free) in PDF format. 

To guide you through these various technologies and their application, IDTechEx will bring it all together at the second annual Printed Electronics Europe 2006 conference in Cambridge, UK on 20-21 April 2006. Printed Electronics World will be held in Phoenix on 5 - 6 December 2006 and Printed Electronics Asia in January 2007. Please see www.printelec.com for more details or contact Chris Clare at c.clare@idtechex.com