Printed Electronics
Printed Electronics (PE) is the term for a relatively new technology that defines the printing of electronics on common media such as paper, plastic, and textile using standard printing processes.
Instead of printing graphic arts inks, families of electrically functional electronic inks are used to print active devices, such as thin film transistors. Printed electronics is expected to facilitate widespread and very low-cost electronics useful for applications not typically associated with conventional (i.e., silicon-based) electronics, such as flexible displays, smart labels, animated posters, and active clothing.
The term printed electronics is often used in association with organic electronics or plastic electronics, where one or more functional inks are composed of carbon-based compounds. While these other terms refer to the material system, the process used to deposit them can be either solution-based, vacuum-based, or some other method. Printed electronics, in contrast, specifies the process, and can utilize any solution-based material, including organic semiconductors, inorganic semiconductors, metallic conductors, nanoparticles, nanotubes, etc.
Electronic devices and circuits can be made by printing solution-based polymer materials onto flexible or rigid surfaces. Layers with different functions are printed, one at a time and with great precision at a micro scale, onto a surface referred to as a ‘substrate’. By building up layers using additive printing processes, combined with coating and patterning processes, an electronic device is generated. The device might be a photovoltaic cell, a display that emits or reflects light, a battery or combination of these.
Innovation in printed electronics is occurring alongside wider developments in organic and thin-film electronics. It is not sensible to try to define ‘printed’, ‘plastic’ and ‘organic’ electronics as separate terms. They are different ways of describing innovations in the electronics field, but they use common materials, processes and device architectures.