Mobile technology

Printed electronics will revolutionise how mobile phones are used

Dr Peter Harrop, Chairman, IDTechEx

Printed electronics is a term that covers printed and potentially printed electronics and electrics. It is the basis of an emerging $300 billion business embracing transistors, memory, displays, solar cells, batteries, sensors, lasers and much more.

This new type of electronics will appear as adhesive tape, wallpaper, billboards, labels, skin patches, smart packaging and books, because it will be foldable, conformal, wide area, ultra low cost, edible, rollable, transparent and biodegradable, as needed. There are already transparent transistors, batteries, solar cells and more on the way, and Kodak has recently patented edible RFID on medicine. And it will be pivotal to the future of mobile phones.

Thanks to printed electronics, mobile phones will have large snap-back keyboards, chargers and colour video displays and some of the displays will work well in sunlight. The rest of the world will copy the 40 million Japanese currently using phones to get onto transport and buy things in shops and at smart posters.

One billion RFID-enabled phones will eventually be sold every year. Miniaturising and cost reducing those phones and the smart posters, terminals for tourists and other items that the phones will interrogate will be down to printed electronics. Indeed, a terminal will be reduced to being a label, shelf-edge display or poster so it costs far less and does not get in the way. Then there is home medicine.

More than 300,000 people die in Europe and US every year from taking medicines incorrectly, and it has been proven that printed electronics can play a big role to reduce this number. The Compliers Group of the Netherlands makes a self-adhesive RFID-enabled label that can be applied to existing, standard medication blister packs for monitoring whether patients take their medicine correctly. The RFID-enabled label can be read by a simple mobile telephone or dedicated telemedicine device, real time, online with an internet-accessible database, including the data of the subscribing physician and/or care givers.

According to Andy Hannah, CEO of Plextronics, printed electronics is shaping the way that renewable energy is captured and utilized: "The development of organic solar cell technology has made tremendous progress even since we entered this market just two years ago. We expect that our customers will use this technology in applications such as OPV chargers for cell phones and laptops. We've seen the efficiency of these cells progress very quickly both in our labs and in the industry as a whole. It's an exciting time to be a printed electronics company."

Solarmer Energy, based near Los Angeles is developing translucent, flexible and low-cost plastic solar cells which are versatile and aesthetically pleasing. This novel technology uses conjugated organic polymers as the active material. As a result, the plastic solar cells have the potential to be light-weight and easy to manufacture on a large-scale at a much lower cost than traditional silicon and other thin-film PV cells. Solarmer has established a state-of-the-art research and development centre.

The company aims to produce the first prototypes in the second half of 2009. Some of the challenges for the plastic solar cell technology are the low efficiency compared to silicon solar cells (currently in the range of 5%) and shorter lifetimes.

Printed RFID labels will replace trillions of barcodes thanks to printed electronics. Indeed, they will increasingly be printed directly onto the barcodes of today. That means that RFID-enabled mobile phones will rapidly become the preferred way of buying products and services, wherever they are. No one in the mobile phone industry should ignore how printed electronics will completely change their industry.