Printed electronics companies are currently working in fields ranging from: smart credit cards (with auth codes for instance), medical patches, interactive packaging (in the Harry Pottery sense but also for sensing), interactive playing cards, children's books and board games (also Harry Pottery), smart labels for logistics purposes, stickers, control panels in automobiles and other circumstances where you may have a non-flat surface.
There's a lot of interesting work being done on the flexible board technologies themselves. AgIc and others are supplying the tools for personal fabrications of flex circuits. It's way cheaper today to prototype using inkjet printed copper on PET than normal PCBs.
Finally, there is a little distinction between traditional FPC technology, where discrete components are placed on a kapton-based film, and printed electronics technologies, the idea of producing electronics components ranging from transistors, batteries, displays, memory, antennas or sensors. Printoo uses a hybrid approach since Printed Electronics are not yet mature enough to provide the full solution.
We think printed electronics allows for three key features in new products:
- Freedom in design. It used to be that electronics was about designing square rigid boards to put inside square rigid boards. That doesn't have to be the case anymore.
- Low-power applications. Printed components tend to be very low power (electrochromic displays) or to provide that little bit of power while still being flexible and printed (printed OPV, printed batteries);
- Cost feasibility in high volume. These technologies, taking advantage of printing processes already available in the printing industry, can reach price points feasible for a lot of applications where traditional electronics are not.
Lets say you have an idea to make intelligent boarding passes for airports. With Printoo, you can make a prototype using electrochromic displays to tell you how long you have before boarding and/or how far away you are from your gate. You can have printed batteries powering the system. You can have Bluetooth for positioning and synch with the servers. It's not going to look exactly like a boarding pass, but it'll be a much closer approximation than would be possible with any other proto board and it will use technologies that would make sense for that. You would most likely be able to make and code a mock intelligent boarding pass, looking reasonably good, in under an hour.
At a second stage then you could design a custom board integrating these technologies and have concept prototype that would be much closer to a true boarding pass. We want to also help people have access to the right tools for this stage.
We thought that the current existing prototyping kits didn't offer the right form-factors to prototype product concepts for things like smart wearables and the high-volume internet of things (where intelligence is added to stickers, labels, packages, and so on).
You're very right, we should clarify. The technologies not previously available to the public refer to the printed electronics components: electrochromic displays, printed carbon-zinc batteries, LED die chips on film, printed polymer solar cells and printed light sensors.
I'm part of the team behind this project. Your guess is very much on the money on both counts - we can't deny we'd love to blow past it, and the fab process for many of the components is already set up.
One other factor is that our company, and our partners in this project, really want to get these technologies out in the open for people to use and play around with. There is a lot of innovation happening with Printed Electronics but unfortunately it has mainly been kept within R&D labs and B2B. Developing this project was an investment we were willing to make mostly internally.