Printed Electronics Technology is the electronic manufacturing technology based on the principle of printing. In the past 50 years, silicon based semiconductor microelectronics technology has been at the dominant position of electronic technologies.
But due to the increasing complexity of silicon based integrated circuit manufacturing technology and the huge investment required, the manufacturing of silicon based integrated circuits is in the hands of a few large companies around the world. Therefore, in the past 10 years, the research and development efforts of making organic and inorganic semiconductor materials into solution propelled the exploration and studies into fabricating various electronic devices with the method of traditional printing technologies. The organic and inorganic semiconductor materials solutions do not rely on conducting or semiconducting properties of the substrate materials and could be deposited onto any material in thin film format. The methods of deposition can be evaporation, spin coating or printing. Thus, a new electronic field different from silicon based microelectronics - Printed Electronics is generated.
The advantages of printed electronic products include large area, flexibility and low cost, a big contrast against silicon based electronic products, and the manufacturing method is low temperature added manufacturing method which is green-tech and environment friendly. Since printed electronics could print any materials that is made into solution and could print on any substrate materials, it could be easily connected to other electronics such as organic, plastic, flexible, transparent, paper as well as wearable electronics. Though the properties of printed electronic devices are not as good as silicon based microelectronic devices, the advantages of low cost, large area and flexibility create a large range of application fields where silicon based microelectronic devices are difficult to apply.
In 2014 the market scale of printed electronics reached 11.5 billion US dollars and will reach 16.7 billion dollars in 2019, with compound annual growth rate of about 58%.
