Issue #175 | Jan. 9, 2009 | by Dr. Peter Harrop
Writing about printed electronics often as I do, the dynamics of the marketplace keep coming fast. Yesterday's unheard of technologies are becoming categories of technology with blinding speed.
Brand managers and consumer product designers who are still thinking of printed electronics solely based on old advances in color, shape and mechanical function are rapidly being overtaken. Surfaces that change texture, color or shape when electricity is applied are only a humble beginning compared to what is about to hit the industry.
On the horizon are packages that display a moving color image, if necessary with sound. They may do this when they detect someone near in a shop. They will stop when that person goes away.
As you have guessed, it takes power to make this happen and laminar batteries – batteries made of thin, flat and often flexible electronic circuits, may be just the juice for the job.
Electronic swing tags using printed batteries for apparel retailing are near to significant orders thanks to the tremendous payback from adjusting prices remotely. Questions remain however.
Leaping past coin cells is a big hurdle
Of course you are familiar with coin cells, or button batteries. Whether for 100 million talking gift cards or 50 million car key remotes every year, the choice is coin cells. Coin cells are the favoured power source not just for active RFID tags, but also hearing aids, wristwatches, calculators and more.
Even where a thinner battery is needed and footprint not a constraint, the choice is usually coin cells. Laminar batteries can cost ten times more. Made by an increasing number of businesses, they usually have success only where the need for thinness and flexibility is extreme.
The Estee Lauder smart skin patch, which delivers cosmetics through the skin using the iontophoretic effect, is an example of this. The design consists of a Power Paper manganese zinc oxide battery and printed electrodes, the patch being soaked in the cosmetic. A button battery would be uncomfortable; and the considerable premium Lauder can charge based on benefits to the user easily justifies the cost of the printed alternative.
Strategy to conquer the market
The billions a year spent on coin cell is a market there for the taking. Almost anywhere you see a coin cell, a thinner battery would be valued and flexibility often an advantage, but in few cases now does this command a price premium. For example, Toppan Forms Audio Paper, using a laminar battery with a complete recording and playback circuit in a thin card, has been a failure for gift cards. The cost was too high.
To tackle the coin cell market, laminar battery makers must do two things the coin cell people did years ago. First, they should take high volume orders even at a loss, so they can get economy of scale and get down the experience curve. Second, they must be standardised. An elegant set of standards would use the publishing "A" sizes already used in some sheet production of finished laminar electronic products.
For example, e-books have limited success at A5, but A4 readers look like a solution. These will be a huge success, because that will be compatible with most of the paper that business people handle across most of the world and the associated folders, bags and so on that are in use. Batteries to go with this might be standard at A8. They will usurp coin cells by becoming affordable, interchangeable and multiply sourced.
Getting thinner than supermodels
So who is pursuing this? I spoke to a few of them at our Printed Electronics USA conference last month in San Jose, Calif. In our interviews, most are sticking with the customized, specialty, higher-priced products.
It may be a while before these trailblazing power producers try to compete with coin cells. Dr John Heitzinger of Soligie sees scope for standard laminar batteries. Some spoke about markets for such cells in heavily customized designs.
One source says the first priority in standards should be test methods, because even the life of a battery is measured differently between companies. What a far cry from photovoltaics, where everyone accepts the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the USA as global referee in comparing performances and reproducing experiments.
One shared vision is a market where high volume product manufacturers make the batteries under license right on their production line, all integrated in one go. "I think it is a great idea," says Makku Paukku, president of Enfucell, but he cautions there will probably need to be different standards for performance of lithium vs. manganese dioxide zinc cells.
At IDTechEx we feel that standards for footprint and thickness could be the same for both technologies. We believe there is scope for a large company to buy a few of these smaller players and finance a move to the big opportunity for replacing almost all coin cells with laminar cells. They are more compatible with the ultra thin e-books, e-magazines and other electronic products of the future.
Maybe forming a captive ISO specification, where anyone can participate, but all pay royalties to one supplier, would be a part of that. A billion dollar opportunity perhaps?
Dr. Peter Harrop is Chairman of IDTechEx. Join us at Printed Electronics Europe in Dresden, Germany on 7-8 April, 2009 or read "Inorganic and Composite Printed Electronics" Inorganic and Composite Printed Electronics 2008-2018: IDTechEx or "Printed Photovoltaics and Batteries" Printed and Thin Film Photovoltaics and Batteries: IDTechEx
