Sensors, Haptics & Displays

The news media are full of the details of the global financial meltdown. Is this affecting finance for the small companies and start-ups involved in printed and potentially printed electronics and electrics? We think not.

How Printed Electronics is changing consumer goods and services - highlights from the forthcoming Printed Electronics USA event

The new IDTechEx masterclass, called "Creating new products with printed electronics," will explore the needs by industry sector and appraise the technologies and timelines.

Third Generation Active RFID is the Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) sometimes known as the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and characterized by the tag doubling as a reader and a so-called mesh network being used with a choice of sensors on each tag.

Passive radar is a term applied to radar that covertly employs other people's emissions as they reveal targets, no signal being emitted by those doing the covert detection. This has military uses. It is not to be confused with Real Time Locating System RTLS using passive tags, a new form of RFID-based RTLS that has burst onto the scene in 2008. This employs passive tags instead of the traditional active tags. The idea is actually about ten years old and it was mooted as a UHF system by Trolleyscan who called it RFID Radar and demonstrated by RFSAW, which uses Surface Acoustic Wave chips that are more sensitive and simpler to make than the silicon chips used by everyone else - active and passive.

IDTechEx, along with other analysts, forecast the printed electronics market. While some agree others give widely different figures. After analyzing the industry for nine years, IDTechEx has just completed a new report covering the forecasts of the industry in great detail. Here Raghu Das, CEO, summarises the findings giving that crucial detail behind our forecasts.

What a difference a year makes. RFID progress from highlights at the IDTechEx RFID Smart Labels USA event.

Replacing the silicon chip: progress with printed RFID.

The prosperous RFID business is on track to grow from about $5 billion in 2007 today to over $25 billion in 2017. Without collusion, most analysts agree to figures in that region and several of them see huge volumes of extremely low cost tags forming a part of the growth - even hundreds of billions in ten years from now. This seems to sit awkwardly with some press reporting that RFID retail initiatives have stalled. As one of those analysts, let IDTechEx explain.

A new range of transistors using thin films of organic or inorganic compounds as the semiconductors and gate dielectrics are being pursued by organizations in over 30 countries. The new IDTechEx report