UK company PragmatIC Printing announced plans to commercialise products with integrated printed electronics at the recent S2K conference.
The firm is working with De La Rue Holographics, a subsidiary of banknote printing firm De La Rue, on integrating security into products. PragmatIC is also working in partnership with greetings card company Tigerprint, a subsidiary of Hallmark, on cards with added electronic functionality.
Richard Price, COO of PragmatIC, announced its intention to launch commercial prototypes based on these partnerships in 2012.
PragmatIC bought the intellectual property of Nano ePrint, which secured the partnership with Tigerprint on greetings cards development, in December 2010.
Price says: 'We've just completed the first phase of prototyping with Tigerprint.'
The greetings cards market provides an opportunity to introduce printed electronics to paper or card-based products without the same price constraints felt in items such as item-level packaging or other high-volume, low-cost products.
Price notes: 'There is enough in greetings cards for this to make sense at the price points of £3-£5 [€3.40-€5.60].'
Smart packaging
The company is also looking at some initial uses of smart packaging technology. Price presented a concept of a label with an integrated timer for a hair dye: the user tears off the electronic label, presses a start button, and the label indicates when they need to rinse out the hair dye after the recommended amount of time.
Price adds: 'These sorts of applications involve simple logic and are realistic in the next 1-2 years.'
The S2K conference brought together a number of firms in the fields of nanotechnology and plastic electronics in a workshop on the first day of the conference, to discuss the complementary nature of the two domains. Speakers at the main conference include Intel, Imec and the UK's Technology Strategy Board.
The next issue of +Plastic Electronics magazine is a nanotechnology special, with a series of articles on the latest technologies and emerging markets for printed nanoelectronics.
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