Advanced Materials

Load bearing structures that are also electronic or electrical are called structural electronics. This two-for-the-price-of-one approach can be more reliable, attractive and long-lived and it always saves space.

2014 has been an eventful year for the graphene industry.

The market for hybrid and pure electric cars homologated as such is set to be $188 billion in 2025 according to IDTechEx analysis.

Structural electronics (SE) is one of the most important emerging technologies in this century.

OLED displays are the biggest opportunity for flexible encapsulation and for that reason IDTechEx has highlighted the most significant advances in the technology in its recently updated report on the topic "Barrier Layers for Flexible Electronics 2015-2025: Technologies, Markets, Forecasts".

The Apple Watch was officially announced earlier this month, with the promise that it will come with a flexible display. However, there is some confusion about what the term means and what the benefits are for consumers. Dr Guillaume Chansin, co-author of the IDTechEx report "OLED Display Forecasts 2014-2024: the rise of plastic and flexible displays" gives his view on flexible displays.

Graphene electrodes are one of the best prospects for enabling supercapacitors and superbatteries to take up to half of the lithium-ion battery market in 15 years - amounting to tens of billions of dollars yearly.

IDTechEx forecasts that the market for plastic and flexible OLED displays will rise to $16bn by 2020.

New research by IDTechEx in the report Graphene Markets, Technologies and Opportunities 2014-2024 External Link shows that graphene markets will grow from around $20 million in 2014 to more than $390 million in 2024, at the material level.

The conductive ink and paste business is a large market that will generate $1.6 billion in 2014 in revenue at the ink/paste level.