Printed electronics is growing to become a $300 billion market and, in 2007 alone, many factories are coming on stream to print, for the first time, transistors, displays and solar cells. The advent of foldable, rollable, wide area and very high volume electronics hangs on this.

Printed stretchable electronics, biodegradable electronics, ubiquitous sensor networks and radically improved human interfaces will lead to a host of new products and applications. We shall have more forms of conformal electronics like the giant plastic film electroluminescent displays today. We shall add wearable electronics thanks to printing and there is the prospect of replacing most of the world’s lighting with something more versatile, lower in cost and lower in power consumption while being more environmental as well. There is also the prospect of replacing 5-10 trillion barcodes yearly with printed RFID that is more versatile, reliable and has a lower cost of ownership.

Disposable, flexible products will be particularly important. In the Third World, ubiquitous lighting, power and the laptop costing $50 or less can transform literacy and create prosperity thanks to these new technologies.

The effort to achieve this is remarkably evenly split between East and West. The first division, doing more than any other nations, are Japan in the East and the USA in the West. The same symmetry appears in the second and third divisions as well – Korea and Germany, and Taiwan and the UK respectively. However, beyond OLEDs, little is reported on the huge activity in East Asia.  full story