Ink-Jet Printing Facility Set to Crank Out Flexible Electronics
New plant for mass-producing custom light sensors may be the tip of the iceberg
By JR Minkel

An Austrian company announced this week that it has opened the first manufacturing plant for printing cheap, disposable light sensors onto custom surfaces such as glass and flexible plastic.

So-called flexible electronics technology is most often associated with slim computer displays that bend like plastic. Nanoident Technologies, based in Linz, aims to produce sensors for applications such as rapid medical testing and fingerprint analysis. But makers of flexible displays and other emerging technologies are gearing up to begin production later this year, meaning that a number of new devices may soon come to market.

To manufacture microprocessors like the ones in home computers and cell phones, a robot repeatedly adds layers of material to a rigid wafer of silicon and then etches away parts of the layers to leave a pattern of circuitry. Industry has honed the technique for decades, but it still relies on those hard wafers, which cannot be used to make pliable computer displays, for example.

In Nanoident's new facility, an industrial-size ink-jet machine prints circuits on top of one of several rigid or flexible materials, including paper. Just as a home ink-jet printer draws letters using ink, Nanoident's printer drizzles liquid polymer or a solution of nanoscale particles in a chosen pattern. The liquid dries and the process repeats, resulting in a sandwich consisting of up to four materials.

Each layer is 20 to 200 nanometers thick and reacts to electricity in its own way; a semiconductor mimicking silicon might be stacked between two transparent conductor layers. The sandwiches can be sculpted into numerous basic devices such as transistors, light detectors and light emitters, says Wasiq Bokhari, CEO of Bioident Technologies in Menlo Park, Calif., a U.S. subsidiary of Nanoident.

"It is flexible electronics," Bokhari says. "Most of the substrates we print on are flexible substrates."

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If they are granted a patent for this technique or technology, this is definitely a company to sink a couple of dollars in.

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I hope this isn't going to start another "new technology" kind of thing... Flexible circuitry has been around for decades.
And with the trace size these days, an ink jet isn't capable of placing the size: laser trimming can be extremely accurate, but ink jet just turns into a smaller form of sputter.
It must be remembered that almost every "new" technology has been around for years, decades, or more: they are just being refined, as we learn to do things better.