Plastic memory firm recruits organic ink startup

LONDON – Long-time plastic memory research company Thin Film Electronics ASA has announced a partnership with Polyera Corp. , a 2005 startup that supplies organic semiconductor, dielectric, and interfacial materials for the flexible and printed electronics industry.

The two companies have agreed to co-develop gravure-based ink formulations for use in high-throughput printing equipment and will prototype integrated printed system products incorporating Polyera materials, including n-type semiconductors, with Thinfilm Addressable Memory.

The agreement calls for Polyera (Skokie, Illinois) to supply commercial quantities for Thin Film (Olso, Norway) and partner manufacturers and to have exclusive rights to ink formulations developed for Thin Film's field of use.

"Polyera's groundbreaking work on n-type organic transistors has paved the way for printed CMOS circuits – more energy-efficient logic circuitry with simpler design. Such printed logic plays a key role when we now are combining our memory technology with other printed components to enable printed systems," said Davor Sutija, CEO of Thin Film Electronics.

Thin Film and PARC, the research arm of Xerox, used Polytera materials to demonstrate a printed non-volatile memory device addressed with complementary organic circuits, the organic equivalent of CMOS circuitry. The addition of integrated circuits makes the roll-to-roll printed Thinfilm Memory addressable by printable logic.

"We are building an ecosystem and supply chain for a world filled with the Internet of things, where everything is connected via a smart tag. By engaging with state-of-the-art partners like Polyera, Solvay, who provides the ferroelectric polymer memory material, and InkTec, who recently opened a facility dedicated to manufacturing Thinfilm Memory, we move significantly closer to our goal of enabling fully printed electronics and our memory everywhere vision," said Sutija.

Thin Film announced in August 2011 that InkTec Co. Ltd. (Ansan, South Korea) had opened a production facility dedicated to Thin Film's plastic memory. The manufacturing capacity of the facility was not disclosed.


Related links and articles:

www.thinfilm.se

www.polyera.com

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