Imagine a cheap, reliable mobile phone you could fold into your back pocket, a TV that just rolled up for storage or electronic paper. These are just some of the products that are being made possible by Professor Aimin Song with EPSRC support.
With further support from EPSRC, Song founded Nano ePrint Ltd to commercialise the work and the company continues to go from strength to strength.
Song, from the University of Manchester, is at the forefront of printed or plastic electronics research – a global growth industry, which has an estimated $30bn market by 2015.
He adds: “The future could hold large area, flexible, low cost display screens. We can see lots of possibilities, for instance, flexible, transparent electrical products could be used as electronic tickets for the Olympics or as bar codes, even electronic postage stamps for special delivery or maybe even printed mobile phone technology.”
“The key problem we want to solve is low performance and high cost of conventional printed electronics. That’s at the heart of it,” says Song. At present, the speed and cost of conventional printed electronics can prohibit potential applications. “Our technology works at much higher speeds so we can talk about lots of applications like RFID tags, mobile phones, and WIFI applications,” he adds. “And we use a single layer device structure that can be printed in one step. This reduces cost and complexity.”
AIMIN SONG THE FUTURE OF ELECTRONICS
“EPSRC funding was very critical. The first project was the device study, with less research on commercialisation.”
“FURTHER EPSRC FUNDING THEN HELPED BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN THE FUNDAMENTAL STUDY AND COMMERCIALISATION.”