Dave Savastano, Editor03.09.15
Equipment manufacturers are in a good position to see if growth is occurring in the markets they serve, and what stage of development products are in. For the field of flexible and printed electronics (PE), leading equipment manufacturers are seeing some movement toward commercialization, with orders starting to come in for manufacturing lines as opposed to pilot production and lab equipment.
Stan Farnsworth, vice president of marketing for NovaCentrix, said that the company is seeing expansion in key areas for PE.
“We see significant growth in many application areas, including displays, sensors, energy storage and flexible conductors such as antennas,” said Farnsworth. “Broader application types such as wearables, photovoltaics and automotive continue to see strong activity as well.”
Louis R. Panico, CEO, XENON Corporation, said that XENON is focused on the printed electronics market, specifically in the area of photonic sintering of conductive inks.
“Within the printed electronics market are several categories, including display, LED/OLED, RFID/sensors, printed memory, printed batteries, PV, etc.,” Panico added. “XENON is doing well with display and RFID while continuing to explore the other markets.
“We have more than 50 years of experience in designing high energy pulsed light systems for industry, and for us this is a natural fit for our expertise and technology,” Panico added. “Within five years, we have developed a range of products for printed electronics for both R&D and production to make this a practicable solution for low temperature sintering, on flexible substrates such as PET, of a variety of inks including copper and silver. XENON is thriving in this industry with sales of more than 100 systems worldwide, including systems for R2R production. As an inclusive company, we have developed a network of partner sites which include industrial, governmental and academic institutes to advance the technology further.”
Thomas Kolbusch, vice president, Coatema Coating Machinery GmbH, said that key markets in printed electronics include flexible photovoltaics, OLED display and lighting, print systems for thin film batteries and wearable electronics or smart textiles.
“The next developing market is sensors in a lot of variations, and the biggest growth is in integrated inline systems, where we have not only coating, printing or laminating processes, but add laser patterning, lithography, inkjet, nano imprint, inline quality control systems like spectroscopy and new curing systems like laser sintering or photonic curing,” Kolbusch added.
Nicolas Bernardin, deputy managing director and co-founder of Ceradrop, said that Ceradrop is now selling most of its equipment range to R&D labs, universities and industrial end users.
“Ceradrop is doing very well in this R&D market, with about 30% growth in 2013 and a significant growth in 2014 as well,” Bernardin added. “The most important thing to highlight is that industrial end users investing in our technology are growing quickly since last year.”
John Palazzolo, director, marketing and sales for Adphos North America, Inc., said that some customers are looking to move from lab scale test equipment toward production.
“Several of our customers are looking at how to bring lab scale testing to production level systems,” Palazzolo noted.
David Ventola, director of business development for B&W MEGTEC, said that the market for roll-to-roll equipment remains limited, but there are projects reaching fruition.
“B&W MEGTEC is focused on displays, lighting, conductive coatings, OPV and encapsulant films for roll-to-roll production lines,” said Ventola. “At present, we find limited roll-to-roll activity in PE. However, we have engaged successfully on a handful of projects.”
Meeting Customers’ Needs
Considering the variety of flexible and printed electronics products, as well as the different stages of development for each of these applications, it comes as no surprise that equipment suppliers are working on different approaches when designing their company’s newest products. For example, Farnsworth said that versatility is an important consideration for flexible and printed electronics manufacturers.
“Customers are really looking for versatility from the equipment, as often times their own processes are not locked yet and so they like their equipment to be flexible and changeable to accommodate direction changes in their development programs,” Farnsworth said. “System integration is another key topic. NovaCentrix is working with several integrators that specialize in material handling, to provide clients the right total platform. Sometimes, customers may already have selected a preferred integrator, and so we work closely with those groups.”
Panico said that flexibility, simplicity, cost and reliability are important to end users.
“Our customers, whether R&D, device makers or machine integrators, are looking for flexibility with simplicity, performance with price, reliability and quality,” Panico said. “Above all, the tool must work to address their specific challenge (i.e., predictive tools, operative feedback, scalability, economy of space, etc.)
“There are numerous functional specifications that need to be met for any given application,” added Panico. “These may include adhesion, layer thickness, substrate temperature and porosity, or dealing with solvent or binder removal, oxide inhibition and depth of cure require precise system control. By dealing directly with the customer, to assist in characterization of their process through our applications support group and partner sites, we are able to learn and develop custom solutions for them. Because we manufacture all aspects of the photonic system, including the lamp, the lamp housing, optics and electronics, we can rapidly develop systems and incorporate them into new equipment.These tools are becoming used for R2R production quicker.”
Kolbusch noted that one area of interest from customers is modularity combined with high accuracy.
“We developed, for example, the Click&Coat system, where with a patented connection system you can remove one part of the pilot coater completely and move another system in,” Kolbusch said. “This gives the biggest amount of flexibility in R&D development, and can be also used to add additional drying capacity to the existing one. With this you can scale up your former R&D pilot coater into a small production line.”
Another advance that customers want is the ability to integration additional processes like laser, inkjet, nano imprint, ALD and others.
“We integrated already several laser systems and other add-on systems into our different ranges of lab and pilot coater like Smartcoater, Basecoater and Click&Coat and can demonstrate these capabilities in the different R&D clusters like Printocent, Simtech and Fraunhofer ILT for our customers,” Kolbusch said.
Bernardin noted that customers are looking for enabling new deposition technologies such as multi-piezo inkjet printheads and inks, fully integrated inline process steps such as pre and post inkjet curing, inspection and conditioning.
“The focus of Ceradrop is on the capability to provide customer with the most appropriate solution especially in terms of flexibility, affordable pricing that will meet available research budgets and industrial scale up targets, as well as world class before and after sales technical support,” Bernardin reported.
Ventola said that flexibility is important, as is having a turnkey system. “Our customers are looking for turnkey lab, pilot or production scale systems,” Ventola said. “They want the flexibility to have multiple deposition methods either in sequence or with easy changeover. We are developing modular stations that can be linked or swapped out to provide flexibility to the customer.”
Advances Toward Commercialization
The ultimate goal for flexible and printed electronics is reaching the commercial market, and while that is occurring, it PE has yet to fully reach its potential.
“B&W MEGTEC has seen very limited advances toward commercialization,” Ventola noted. “One customer was scaling up on a sensor application, while another moved to pilot production for conductive coating on foil.”
Panico said that printed electronics, particularly where it relates to photonic sintering, is already being commercialized, but not at the high volumes that would allow for widespread or mainstream use.
“We have delivered systems for pilot as well as full production sintering,” Panico added. “In one case, the application of custom printed electronics for rapid prototyping in small to medium volumes, for example, for custom membrane keypads and interconnects. We also delivered systems for printed RFID in high volumes. However, commercialization is still restricted to niche applications in addressing a specific requirement unique to an organization and is not ready for general use.
“Commercialization is inevitable with more and more large tech companies getting involved and the development of these inks refined to address the commercial challenges,” Panico concluded. “One indicator is the increase in the number of companies offering or developing copper inks, which suggests that a viable low cost alternative to silver is imminent. Once the cost barrier is overcome and complete solution is offered, moving to widespread commercialization will be a natural progression.”
“Many new technologies, including photonic curing as pioneered by NovaCentrix, have now become accepted in the community,” Farnsworth said. “One sign the technology has been accepted is by which customer groups are involved. Early in the acceptance cycle, the primary contacts are in the R&D groups of the clients. As the efforts progress however, primary contacts shift into engineering and operations functions of our client organizations. This has been the case with Muhlbauer, which can be cited, and with several other groups which still cannot be cited.”
To meet the needs of customers, equipment suppliers have introduced a wide range of technologies.
“At PE USA 2014 in Santa Clara, CA in November, NovaCentrix along with our partners showcased several examples of equipment integration,” Farnsworth said. “Partners included Ceradrop, Northfield Automation, Harper, Bosch Rexroth, Adphos, Xaar and Dimatix. We have ongoing programs in place with each of these terrific groups. We also have a wearables collaboration with CETEMMSA in Spain, and we collaborated with DuPont in supporting the launch of their exciting new photonic copper ink, which is ideally cured with the NovaCentrix PulseForge tools.”
“XENON now has available the S-5100 Wide Width R2R system,” Panico added. “The S-5100 is the first wide width system ready for R2R production. The S-5100 has been customer qualified for sintering both silver and copper in R2R production. With capability of processing web width of 1m with exceptional uniformity, optical powers up to 5J/cm2 and precision digital control using a touch screen display and scalability for higher throughputs, it is the ideal choice for enabling high speed production level photonic sintering at an affordable price. XENON shipped the first S-5100 to a customer in Asia at the end of January 2015.”
Outlook for Flexible and Printed Electronics
Overall, PE equipment manufacturers remain optimistic about the commercial potential for flexible and printed electronics.
“The global installed base of the PulseForge tools continues to grow rapidly, the number of active and ongoing customer projects is growing, and the number of collaborations is growing,” Farnsworth said. “Every day we see more mainstream applications for flexible and printed electronics coming to us, with requests for product, process support, and contracted development support.”
“In the near term, we continue to expect limited opportunities,” said Ventola. “Since the product demand is modest, we expect the transition to the roll-to-roll process will be medium to longer term. That said, we continue to find opportunities for process development and scale-up.”
“Wearable electronics, sensors for home automation, OLED displays are the short medium term products we see the big push for,” Kolbusch said. “Middle term, we see integrated devices like sensors powered by a thin film battery or powered by OPV as one of the trends in the industry.”
“Based on Ceradrop’s close relationship with advanced R&D and industrial markets, we are seeing growing trends from leaders of these segments to adopt digital materials deposition to their next manufacturing process,” Bernardin said.
“For the near term, we are optimistic,” Palazzolo said. “However, there seems to be some additional work that needs to take place for the industry to find the killer application(s) to propel the industry forward by quantum leaps.”
Panico said that XENON sees the long term future looking promising for the printed electronics market.
“The sales of sintering tools for R&D is growing, and gradually increasing numbers of our R&D customers are talking to us about transitioning to wide web and/or high speed production,” Panico said. “By having a scalable technology, we are able to directly translate their R&D work directly to production. The promise of high volume, low cost and even disposable electronics will enable applications that are unimaginable today.”
For more information on equipment for flexible and printed electronics, go online at www.printedelectronicsnow.com.
Stan Farnsworth, vice president of marketing for NovaCentrix, said that the company is seeing expansion in key areas for PE.
“We see significant growth in many application areas, including displays, sensors, energy storage and flexible conductors such as antennas,” said Farnsworth. “Broader application types such as wearables, photovoltaics and automotive continue to see strong activity as well.”
Louis R. Panico, CEO, XENON Corporation, said that XENON is focused on the printed electronics market, specifically in the area of photonic sintering of conductive inks.
“Within the printed electronics market are several categories, including display, LED/OLED, RFID/sensors, printed memory, printed batteries, PV, etc.,” Panico added. “XENON is doing well with display and RFID while continuing to explore the other markets.
“We have more than 50 years of experience in designing high energy pulsed light systems for industry, and for us this is a natural fit for our expertise and technology,” Panico added. “Within five years, we have developed a range of products for printed electronics for both R&D and production to make this a practicable solution for low temperature sintering, on flexible substrates such as PET, of a variety of inks including copper and silver. XENON is thriving in this industry with sales of more than 100 systems worldwide, including systems for R2R production. As an inclusive company, we have developed a network of partner sites which include industrial, governmental and academic institutes to advance the technology further.”
Thomas Kolbusch, vice president, Coatema Coating Machinery GmbH, said that key markets in printed electronics include flexible photovoltaics, OLED display and lighting, print systems for thin film batteries and wearable electronics or smart textiles.
“The next developing market is sensors in a lot of variations, and the biggest growth is in integrated inline systems, where we have not only coating, printing or laminating processes, but add laser patterning, lithography, inkjet, nano imprint, inline quality control systems like spectroscopy and new curing systems like laser sintering or photonic curing,” Kolbusch added.
Nicolas Bernardin, deputy managing director and co-founder of Ceradrop, said that Ceradrop is now selling most of its equipment range to R&D labs, universities and industrial end users.
“Ceradrop is doing very well in this R&D market, with about 30% growth in 2013 and a significant growth in 2014 as well,” Bernardin added. “The most important thing to highlight is that industrial end users investing in our technology are growing quickly since last year.”
John Palazzolo, director, marketing and sales for Adphos North America, Inc., said that some customers are looking to move from lab scale test equipment toward production.
“Several of our customers are looking at how to bring lab scale testing to production level systems,” Palazzolo noted.
David Ventola, director of business development for B&W MEGTEC, said that the market for roll-to-roll equipment remains limited, but there are projects reaching fruition.
“B&W MEGTEC is focused on displays, lighting, conductive coatings, OPV and encapsulant films for roll-to-roll production lines,” said Ventola. “At present, we find limited roll-to-roll activity in PE. However, we have engaged successfully on a handful of projects.”
Meeting Customers’ Needs
Considering the variety of flexible and printed electronics products, as well as the different stages of development for each of these applications, it comes as no surprise that equipment suppliers are working on different approaches when designing their company’s newest products. For example, Farnsworth said that versatility is an important consideration for flexible and printed electronics manufacturers.
“Customers are really looking for versatility from the equipment, as often times their own processes are not locked yet and so they like their equipment to be flexible and changeable to accommodate direction changes in their development programs,” Farnsworth said. “System integration is another key topic. NovaCentrix is working with several integrators that specialize in material handling, to provide clients the right total platform. Sometimes, customers may already have selected a preferred integrator, and so we work closely with those groups.”
Panico said that flexibility, simplicity, cost and reliability are important to end users.
“Our customers, whether R&D, device makers or machine integrators, are looking for flexibility with simplicity, performance with price, reliability and quality,” Panico said. “Above all, the tool must work to address their specific challenge (i.e., predictive tools, operative feedback, scalability, economy of space, etc.)
“There are numerous functional specifications that need to be met for any given application,” added Panico. “These may include adhesion, layer thickness, substrate temperature and porosity, or dealing with solvent or binder removal, oxide inhibition and depth of cure require precise system control. By dealing directly with the customer, to assist in characterization of their process through our applications support group and partner sites, we are able to learn and develop custom solutions for them. Because we manufacture all aspects of the photonic system, including the lamp, the lamp housing, optics and electronics, we can rapidly develop systems and incorporate them into new equipment.These tools are becoming used for R2R production quicker.”
Kolbusch noted that one area of interest from customers is modularity combined with high accuracy.
“We developed, for example, the Click&Coat system, where with a patented connection system you can remove one part of the pilot coater completely and move another system in,” Kolbusch said. “This gives the biggest amount of flexibility in R&D development, and can be also used to add additional drying capacity to the existing one. With this you can scale up your former R&D pilot coater into a small production line.”
Another advance that customers want is the ability to integration additional processes like laser, inkjet, nano imprint, ALD and others.
“We integrated already several laser systems and other add-on systems into our different ranges of lab and pilot coater like Smartcoater, Basecoater and Click&Coat and can demonstrate these capabilities in the different R&D clusters like Printocent, Simtech and Fraunhofer ILT for our customers,” Kolbusch said.
Bernardin noted that customers are looking for enabling new deposition technologies such as multi-piezo inkjet printheads and inks, fully integrated inline process steps such as pre and post inkjet curing, inspection and conditioning.
“The focus of Ceradrop is on the capability to provide customer with the most appropriate solution especially in terms of flexibility, affordable pricing that will meet available research budgets and industrial scale up targets, as well as world class before and after sales technical support,” Bernardin reported.
Ventola said that flexibility is important, as is having a turnkey system. “Our customers are looking for turnkey lab, pilot or production scale systems,” Ventola said. “They want the flexibility to have multiple deposition methods either in sequence or with easy changeover. We are developing modular stations that can be linked or swapped out to provide flexibility to the customer.”
Advances Toward Commercialization
The ultimate goal for flexible and printed electronics is reaching the commercial market, and while that is occurring, it PE has yet to fully reach its potential.
“B&W MEGTEC has seen very limited advances toward commercialization,” Ventola noted. “One customer was scaling up on a sensor application, while another moved to pilot production for conductive coating on foil.”
Panico said that printed electronics, particularly where it relates to photonic sintering, is already being commercialized, but not at the high volumes that would allow for widespread or mainstream use.
“We have delivered systems for pilot as well as full production sintering,” Panico added. “In one case, the application of custom printed electronics for rapid prototyping in small to medium volumes, for example, for custom membrane keypads and interconnects. We also delivered systems for printed RFID in high volumes. However, commercialization is still restricted to niche applications in addressing a specific requirement unique to an organization and is not ready for general use.
“Commercialization is inevitable with more and more large tech companies getting involved and the development of these inks refined to address the commercial challenges,” Panico concluded. “One indicator is the increase in the number of companies offering or developing copper inks, which suggests that a viable low cost alternative to silver is imminent. Once the cost barrier is overcome and complete solution is offered, moving to widespread commercialization will be a natural progression.”
“Many new technologies, including photonic curing as pioneered by NovaCentrix, have now become accepted in the community,” Farnsworth said. “One sign the technology has been accepted is by which customer groups are involved. Early in the acceptance cycle, the primary contacts are in the R&D groups of the clients. As the efforts progress however, primary contacts shift into engineering and operations functions of our client organizations. This has been the case with Muhlbauer, which can be cited, and with several other groups which still cannot be cited.”
To meet the needs of customers, equipment suppliers have introduced a wide range of technologies.
“At PE USA 2014 in Santa Clara, CA in November, NovaCentrix along with our partners showcased several examples of equipment integration,” Farnsworth said. “Partners included Ceradrop, Northfield Automation, Harper, Bosch Rexroth, Adphos, Xaar and Dimatix. We have ongoing programs in place with each of these terrific groups. We also have a wearables collaboration with CETEMMSA in Spain, and we collaborated with DuPont in supporting the launch of their exciting new photonic copper ink, which is ideally cured with the NovaCentrix PulseForge tools.”
“XENON now has available the S-5100 Wide Width R2R system,” Panico added. “The S-5100 is the first wide width system ready for R2R production. The S-5100 has been customer qualified for sintering both silver and copper in R2R production. With capability of processing web width of 1m with exceptional uniformity, optical powers up to 5J/cm2 and precision digital control using a touch screen display and scalability for higher throughputs, it is the ideal choice for enabling high speed production level photonic sintering at an affordable price. XENON shipped the first S-5100 to a customer in Asia at the end of January 2015.”
Outlook for Flexible and Printed Electronics
Overall, PE equipment manufacturers remain optimistic about the commercial potential for flexible and printed electronics.
“The global installed base of the PulseForge tools continues to grow rapidly, the number of active and ongoing customer projects is growing, and the number of collaborations is growing,” Farnsworth said. “Every day we see more mainstream applications for flexible and printed electronics coming to us, with requests for product, process support, and contracted development support.”
“In the near term, we continue to expect limited opportunities,” said Ventola. “Since the product demand is modest, we expect the transition to the roll-to-roll process will be medium to longer term. That said, we continue to find opportunities for process development and scale-up.”
“Wearable electronics, sensors for home automation, OLED displays are the short medium term products we see the big push for,” Kolbusch said. “Middle term, we see integrated devices like sensors powered by a thin film battery or powered by OPV as one of the trends in the industry.”
“Based on Ceradrop’s close relationship with advanced R&D and industrial markets, we are seeing growing trends from leaders of these segments to adopt digital materials deposition to their next manufacturing process,” Bernardin said.
“For the near term, we are optimistic,” Palazzolo said. “However, there seems to be some additional work that needs to take place for the industry to find the killer application(s) to propel the industry forward by quantum leaps.”
Panico said that XENON sees the long term future looking promising for the printed electronics market.
“The sales of sintering tools for R&D is growing, and gradually increasing numbers of our R&D customers are talking to us about transitioning to wide web and/or high speed production,” Panico said. “By having a scalable technology, we are able to directly translate their R&D work directly to production. The promise of high volume, low cost and even disposable electronics will enable applications that are unimaginable today.”
For more information on equipment for flexible and printed electronics, go online at www.printedelectronicsnow.com.