Worldwide, the printing industry is in a downturn. Some people may ask: “Does the printing technology developed over several centuries come out of the historical stage?†Perhaps it is not such a simple denial. One exciting answer is "electronic printing."
In the United States, the printing industry is mostly sluggish due to the impact of the Internet and new lifestyles. For example, young people prefer televisions, i-pods, and computers to newspapers and magazines. In the packaging industry, such as polyester packaging and self-adhesive label industry, there are some rises, but none are very prosperous. The way of printing replaces them. For example, only 5% of bar codes will be in the form of tags later. Labels for printing packages and product bar codes are being replaced. In the new printing mode, barcodes can now be printed directly at almost zero cost. This industry is hard to survive.
In this case, the printing technology that has developed over the past several centuries really needs to withdraw from the stage of history.
Ink makers, machine builders, and other technical experts in resin printing, ink jet printing, lithography, screen printing, gravure printing, and others are just as old as steam engine experts a hundred years ago. The answer is not necessarily. Of course there will be some way out, this is electronic printing.
This started the conversation. Silicon is a smart core part of almost all electronic products. It includes transistors, diodes, and many other small components, as well as countless wires and connections. Semiconductor technology has the characteristics of more and more miniaturization and the realization of more complex functions with almost no increase in cost, but now the silicon chip has included more devices than it can achieve, that is, it has to Some older mature devices (such as display, power supply, excitation, antenna, etc.) and even larger resistors and capacitors are integrated. All these have brought about an increase in costs and failures in the interconnection. The size of the final device does not show the benefits of silicon miniaturization, often beyond the required size, such as smart packaging.
The cost of the simplest silicon chips has not changed in 10 years, while the silicon chip factory's manufacturing costs have shown an exponential increase - now $3 billion a year - and the cost and R&D of technical support. We need a lot of smaller electronic products, from a large number of blood, insulin and pregnant test products with a good interaction interface, according to the date of self-adjustment to use, prompt us whether to open and heat food and medicine, wall-mounted TV, controllable Wallpaper lights and much more. If the surface of the car is shining all night, the surfaces of the car are like lights, so the car will be more safe and so on. In an emergency, the exterior of the entire car can be instantly painted red to obtain solar energy for storage. For the implementation of these applications, the silicon chip seems to be somewhat incompetent. Although silicon chips can be made into photovoltaic panels and become energy products, these fragile structures cannot be applied on a large scale. All in all, we need cheaper, more flexible, thinner electronics and electronic synthesis devices. We need a press.
There is no doubt that manufacturing silicon chips includes photolithography, but that is an optical and etching technique that has nothing to do with the roll lithography method of the press. The new forms of electronics and electronics, collectively referred to as printed electronics, include existing forms of platform, inkjet, and rotary printing. All traditional techniques are very useful, so we can truly enjoy the benefits of in-depth application of electronics, they are applied to our clothing, packaging, books, medical and many other areas. Printed electronics will soon kick the silicon chip and its discrete components and wires out of the greeting card industry, but that is just the smallest part of what printed electronics will have to do. The Minority Report shows that printed electronics can bring us video and audio in motion on cornflakes. Interactive games on disposable paper packaging have proved to be practical in reality. Even so, there are more important applications that will drive printed electronics forward.
How do printed electronics advance and how does the printing industry participate? The following table shows some examples, including large flexible variable color billboards, replacing traditional printing with more eye-catching things. It will appear on most packages in the future. The printing industry therefore has both "radishes and sticks" to be interested in these new printing applications.
In most cases, we talk about a lot of very different new inks, such as silver conductors, ceramic insulators, copper doped phosphors, and organic and inorganic semiconductors and passivation layers. . Cryogenic cutting, better accuracy, thinner layers and continuity are all challenging jobs. However, this work exceeded 10 billion U.S. dollars, mostly used on polyester film or paper, which has already been put into the market, and has the potential to replace 10 trillion bar codes each year with printed chipless RFID. Indeed, barcodes will be replaced mainly by printing RFID tags directly on the goods, and funds will no longer be invested so heavily in the tags.
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The following is the RFID 2016 world market analysis released by IDTechEx under the influence of printing technology, totaling up to 10 billion US dollars.
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There is no doubt that suppliers of traditional printing inks, such as Sun Chemical, and manufacturers of traditional high-volume printing equipment, such as MAN Roland, will have to enter the printed electronics world. They know that printed electronics will go even further than silicon, and eventually get a bigger market, even a thin sheet of fuel cells and anti-static shielding. Its impact is mainly to build a new market, not to replace silicon. . In fact, the silicon chip industry, such as the button cell battery industry, may not realize that they have kicked the market out of greeting card products. They have other things to do.