The growing demand for flexible, large-area electronic circuitry from packaging, displays, smartcards, sensors, and other sectors will drive the organic transistor and memory market to $21.6 billion by 2015, predict analysts at NanoMarkets, a market researcher in Glen Allen, Va.
Organic logic and memory may be the best chance for bringing down the cost of radio-frequency identification (RFID) to where item-level tracking of moderately priced products becomes economically feasible, predict NanoMarkets analysts in the report “Next Chips: Organic Transistors and Memories and the Applications They Will Enable.” NanoMarkets projects RFID that uses organic circuitry will become an $11.6 billion market.
During the past year, organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) and memories have achieved enhanced credibility as they have achieved performance at or better than some silicon TFTs and as significant investments have been made in production facilities for these organic devices, analysts say.
Smartcards are an untapped opportunity for organic transistors and memory, and the market for organic smart cards is expected to be worth more than $4 billion by 2015, analysts say. Production innovations are necessary to get around the problem of the high-temperature lamination in card manufacture.
OTFTs are already proving themselves in the e-paper backplanes market, but there is massive research going into using OTFTs for active-matrix LCD and OLED displays. This will mean that OTFTs must switch faster than they do now, but the latest work on single-crystal organic transistors show that huge leaps in performance are quite likely. The OTFT backplane market is expected to reach $3.3 billion by 2015, NanoMarkets predicts.
In the recent past, the development of organic memory has languished compared to that of OTFTs, yet it is now catching up rapidly. By 2015, $16.1 billion in electronic products are expected to contain organic memories.
Opportunities to find new “inks” will enable solution processing of OTFTs and organic memories at full production levels. According to NanoMarkets’ report, by 2015 as much as $4.0 billion in materials may be sold for the production of OTFTs and organic memories. For more, visit www.nanomarkets.net.
