IDTechEx CEO Mr Raghu Das interviews Steven Bagshaw of UK-CPI, discussing the projects they are currently working on in the smart packaging industry and how this sector interacts with the printed electronics and energy storage sectors.

It took a decade and half to enable the first commercial products using flexible barrier or thin film encapsulation technologies. Contrary to some assumptions however, this success does not mean that the question of barrier technology is forever settled. Indeed, there is still much work to do to render flexible barrier technology a ubiquitous, widely-available, and low-cost component in devices of all sizes, sensitivity levels, flexibility degrees, and so on.

Graphene is not a young material: the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2010 and the first pioneering firms were established before that c. 2006. Graphene thus has more than a decade of commercial experience already. As IDTechEx have argued previously, after all this time, graphene is becoming increasingly available and affordable and is finally findings its first wave of volume markets. In this article, we will look at the evolution of graphene commercialization so far and will offer some insights about the future.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

The 19th International Symposium on Laser Precision Microfabrication (LPM 2018) was attended by IDTechEx technology analyst Dr Nilushi Wijeyasinghe. LPM 2018 is a laser conference that is accompanied by an exhibition. The event took place in Edinburgh (UK) this year and was organized by the UK-based Association of Industrial Laser Users (AILU). There was a strong presence from both academia and industry. The event covered a variety of laser microfabrication topics. This article highlights several innovations and applications from the exhibition.