Ultra-thiN Integrated Thin-FIlm Electronics Devices (UNITED)

Printed electronics (PE) built on plastic and other cheap substrates (paper/card) can enable
new products in high volume markets such as consumer packaging and anti-counterfeit labels.
The printed electronics market is estimated to be £1.5B today, growing to £30B by 2021 and
£200B by 2027 (IDTechEx), addressing areas such as electronic smart packaging devices
which is projected to grow from £0.02B (2012) to £1B (2022, 35B units). PPL has developed
printed logic (circuits built from active devices such as transistors and diodes) corresponding
to the printed equivalent of a silicon chip for broad applicability in consumer packaging,
security (identification and brand protection) and novelty applications. Conventional
electronics on PCBs is rigid, difficult to distribute within products and over-engineered,
resulting in high cost for these applications. Replacing the PCB with flexible (printed)
electronics could overcome these constraints and enable many new ultrathin form-factor
products. However, novel highly-automated manufacturing processes are required to meet the
extremely high-volumes of these applications and integrate the components. To date existing
integration solutions such as pick-and-place, already widely used in PCB electronics, have
been adapted to printed electronics. However these processes do not currently cost-effectively
scale to the very-high volumes required by consumer packaging and security products
(ultimately >1trn units pa). This development-of-prototype project builds on a previous proofof-
concept project which investigated transfer of printed logic from its original substrate onto
a target surface. This transfer approach substantially broadens the range of applications which
can be addressed by PPL’s printed logic and other printed electronics components, in addition
to providing lower-cost and improved form-factor for already addressable applications.