Silicon Valley

Recently, the commercialization of printed electronics has progressed from conductive patterns to batteries, displays, sensors, resistors, solar cells, lighting and transistor circuits, increasingly in combination.

Printed electronics is the new hot topic in Silicon Valley—it enables the printing of circuits, displays, sensors, batteries, and solar cells which have many new attributes not seen before in conventional electronics, attributes such as electronics that are flexible, laminar, stretchable, lightweight, cheaper or which can be made in very large areas. The newspaper that has a moving display; skin patches which automate delivery of drugs; the bill board poster that is a digital display; the package that senses when you take your medication; plastic solar cells. These are all products available today thanks to printed electronics. The world’s biggest chemical, printing, electronics, and

SAN FRANCISCO—Kovio, Inc., a privately held Silicon Valley company, has introduced an all-printed high-performance silicon thin-film transistor (TFT), a key building block that will enable the integration of electronics into everyday things. Kovio has demonstrated low-cost all-printed silicon TFTs with mobility of 80cm2/Vs, which significantly exceeds the performance of previously reported all-printed TFTs using either organic or inorganic semiconductors. Based on nanotechnology and materials science, Kovio developed the electronic equivalents of color inks for graphics printing. These functional electronic inks include silicon, doped silicon, metals, and insulators. Combining functional electronic inks with high-resolution graphics printing technologies, Kovio has printed high-performance silicon TFTs at a