Products With Organic Transistors and Memory Expected to Reach $21.6 Billion by 2015

GLEN ALLEN, Va.—The growing demand for flexible, large area electronic circuitry from packaging, displays, smartcards, sensors, and other industry sectors will drive the organic transistor and memory market to $21.6 billion by 2015. This is according to a new market research report from NanoMarkets, an industry analyst firm based here. For more information about the report please visit www.nanomarkets.net. Members of the press may request an executive summary.

During the last year, organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) and memories have achieved enhanced credibility as they have achieved performance at or better than some silicon TFTs and as significant investments have been made in production facilities for these organic devices.

Organic logic and memory may be the best chance for bringing down the cost of RFID to a point where item level tracking of moderately priced products becomes economically feasible. NanoMarkets projects RFID that uses organic circuitry will become an $11.6 billion market.

Smartcards are an untapped opportunity for organic transistors and memory and the market for organic smart cards is expected to be worth more than $4 billion by 2015. However, production innovations are required to get round the problem of the high-temperature lamination that is used in card manufacture.

OTFTs are already proving themselves in the e-paper backplanes market, but there is much massive research efforts going into using OTFTs for active matrix LCD and OLED displays. This will mean that the OTFTs will have to switch faster than they do now, but the latest work on single-crystal organic transistors show that huge leaps in performance are quite likely. The OTFT backplane market is expected to reach $3.3 billion by 2015.

In the recent past, the development of organic memory has languished compared to that of OTFTs. But it is now catching up rapidly. By 2015, $16.1 billion in electronic products are expected to contain organic memories.

There are major opportunities to find new “inks” that will enable solution processing of OTFTs and organic memories at full production levels. According to NanoMarkets’ report by 2015 as much as $4.0 billion in materials may be sold for the production of OTFTs and organic memories.