Thinfilm Wins New Product Innovation Award

Frost & Sullivan presented the 2010 Global New Product Innovation Award in Printed Electronic Memories to Thin Film Electronics ASA (Thinfilm).

Frost & Sullivan is a global research organization of 1,800 analysts and consultants who monitor more than 300 industries and 250,000 companies. The award is based on Frost & Sullivan’s Best Practices research on how companies worldwide manage growth, innovation and leadership.

“Thin Film Electronics has a clear advantage over its competitors in terms of product design based on an innovative technique,” said Frost & Sullivan research analyst Sunanda Jayanth.

“A key competitive feature of the technology is that it is fully printable in high volume roll-to-roll machines,” Jayanth continues, and remarks that there is a strong demand for nonvolatile memory products for use in low-cost and low-power flexible electronics applications.

Thinfilm has been developing memories based on polymer materials since 1994.

“Thinfilm’s polymer is ‘smart’, to the extent that functionality is built into the material itself, like switchability, addressability and charge store. Such ‘smart’ materials open up tremendous opportunities in the electronics world,” said Jayanth. “Another key characteristic of the technology used by Thinfilm is that it is based on nontoxic materials.”

Thin Film Electronics ASA is a publicly-listed Norwegian technology company with its head office in Oslo and product development in Linköping, Sweden. Thinfilm is a pioneer in the field of printed electronics, and provides fully-printed non-volatile, rewritable memory for applications in toys & games, logistics, sensor, and ID systems.

Thinfilm’s product offering is the Thinfilm Memory, a 20-bit non-volatile rewriteable memory printed in a high-volume roll-to-roll process, and the Thinfilm Memory Controller, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC).

Thinfilm is developing higher-density printed memories with printed logic circuitry, Thinfilm Adressable Memory. Addressable Thinfilm Memory products will allow integration to create fully printed systems, such as ID tags, sensor tags and disposable price labels.

The printed electronics market is expected to grow to more than $50 billion in annual market value over the next 10 years, according to industry analyst group IDTechEx. IDTechEx predicts that logic, including addressable memory, will be the largest segment in this market.

Using printing to manufacture electronic memory makes it possible to reduce the number of process steps, resulting in dramatically lower manufacturing costs and also reduced environmental impact as compared to traditional semiconductor processes. Commercial applications of printed electronics include e-paper, electronic readers, and organic light emitting (OLED) displays. Sensors, batteries, and photovoltaic energy sources are also in development, and together with Thinfilm’s memory technology, they will open the door to new products and applications, for example, in the field of RFID systems.

Memory is an essential part of most electronics. Memory is required for identification, tracking status, and history, and is used whenever information is stored. Thinfilm’s non-volatile ferroelectric polymer memory technology is well suited for application with other printed electronics devices because power consumption during read and write is negligible, and as the memory is permanent, no connection to external power is required for data detainment. Also, the electric current required to write information is so small that operation would be limited by the battery’s lifetime and not its capacity.