Synthetic biology is making strides in key applications, armed with the ability to create materials never possible before.

It is a technological megatrend providing billion dollar business opportunities. The unique new IDTechEx Research report "Smart Materials as Structural Electronics and Electrics 2019-2029" explains how structural materials can be electronically, electrically, mechanically, magnetically and optically smart nowadays.

This article concerns TactoTek in Oulu Finland and how its technologies can scale up and create billion dollar businesses.

Advances in laser technologies over the past three decades have enabled lasers to progress from specialist scientific instruments to a diverse range of end-user markets. In this article, time periods where data storage and data communication segments dominated the laser diode market are coloured yellow, while the current era of emerging laser diode applications in material processing, sensing and healthcare is indicated by green shading in the charts.

Key areas discussed and displayed at the LCV event include the battery, powertrain, lightweighting, autonomous driving and electric vehicle charging, from not only the technology but also business model and policy perspectives.

The key next iteration for fiber reinforced polymer products will be the concept of multifunctionality. This is the idea of making a structural part carry out additional role(s) beyond their current primary mechanical task - the market for smart composite material is forecast to exceed 5 kilotons by 2029.

This is a technological megatrend. Dumb load-bearing metal structures move to plastic and composite and incorporate energy harvesting and storage material - massless energy. Indeed you could call some of it negative mass energy. Goodbye components-in-a-box.

ITO alternative (TCFs) are no longer a young technology. They have been in the semi commercial mode for more than a decade and half. In that time, they have often come tantalising close to success, and in some instances, even carved out niche markets. Yet, they are still hoping for that great breakthrough. So why has the commercialization process been prolonged for so long?

In April 2018, IDTechEx gave a presentation at the world copper conference in Santiago Chile. This was part of work carried out for the International Copper Association to benchmark the commercial status of emerging conductive material. The presentation delivered can be seen below.

The need for flexible, transparent, ultrahigh performance, and low-cost barriers has long held back the promise of many flexible devices. Indeed, for long, it appeared as the grand challenge, and a potential showstopper.

IDTechEx will be hosting a free webinar on Thursday 13 September titled Graphene and Carbon Nanotube (CNT) Commercialization: Past, Present and Future.

LoC is a device that integrates one or several laboratory functions on a single integrated circuit (commonly called a "chip") to achieve automation and high-throughput screening for PoC.

The new IDTechEx Research report "Global OLED Display Forecasts and Technologies 2019-2029" provides a comprehensive assessment of OLED display technologies and markets based on primary research conducted globally by IDTechEx analysts.

The drone market has boomed in recent years. This is essentially because easy-to-use, reliable and small-sized flying machines have become available at highly accessible prices- well in the range of consumer electronic products. This has created its own demand amongst customers and professional.

Barrier Films and Thin Film Encapsulation for Flexible and/or Organic Electronics 2018-2028 offers a detailed technology analysis assessing R2R multilayer barrier (MLB) film technologies, various inline thin film encapsulation (TFE) techniques, R2R spatial atomic layer deposition (s-ALD), flexible glass and more.

Consumer batteries such as those used in power tools, mobile phones and laptops are normally recycled/disposed after their service life - that's what we normally refer to as the 'end-of-life' of the batteries. However, retired car batteries that are no longer suitable for electric cars could still hold sufficient capacity for second life applications. The 'end-of-life' of an electric car battery needs to be redefined as they could be further used, for example, for another 10 years or even longer in various post-vehicle applications before they are finally recycled/disposed.

In the past five years or so, perovskite quantum dots have emerged as interesting emissive (PL or EL) nanocrystal materials that could one day rival existing cadmium- or indium-based quantum dots (QDs).

The Advanced Automotive Battery Conference (AABC) is a global series of conferences for companies and academics to present their latest research on Li-ion batteries for the auto industry. Every year it is held in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.

Biobased polymers, a class of polymers that are manufactured from a biomass source rather than from an oleochemical source, will grow twice as fast as petrochemical polymers to 2023.

The term machine vision describes a group of technologies that enable a machine to see via imaging for the purpose of process automation, and often refers to industrial vision systems. Applications of machine vision include automated product inspection and vision guided robotics. Here we consider four technology types: illuminating, sensing, processing and learning.