Today a wide range of potential applications for printed electronics and printed functionalities are under development and many young companies are working on the industrialisation. Different printing technologies such as screen printing or inkjet printing are used for applying several types of inks, for instance organic and metal based ones, on different substrate materials (e.g. polymers, papers, glass). Next to the deposition of these materials with the appropriate printing technology, post-treatment processes such as curing, drying and sintering play a key role to evolve a function (e.g. conductivity, semiconducting or dielectric properties) of the printed layers.
PMI falls as manufacturers feel the squeeze
17 months or two and a half years - which is it?