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.

Organic photovoltaics were once considered the next generation of photovoltaic technology. They had huge hype because they had a seductive value proposition: R2R printing of high-performance, robust and flexible solar cells over large areas using low-cost materials and low CapEx high-throughput equipment. progress

IDTechEx analysts report on their findings at LASYS: Industrial Laser Exhibition.

This article sets out to show that the assumption that QDs are a stagnant technology would be very wrong, demonstrating that QDs have now entered a time of growth, and crucially, rapid technological change.

In the aerospace sector reducing the weight is one of the greatest constant priorities. Due to the high technical requirements, economic and legislative drivers, and relatively deep pockets, aerospace is often the first significant adopter of emerging lightweight materials. This article highlights some of these materials at different stages of technology readiness and suggests what their initial application will be.

This premium article will give some of the key conversations with the most technically innovative companies that IDTechEx analysts spoke while at the show.

A new two-part webinar from IDTechEx is available on Additive Manufacturing and Lightweight Materials for Aerospace and Defense.

This article will highlight some of the key advancements surrounding automation for the composite industry.

IDTechEx Research Director Dr Khasha Ghaffarzadeh, Interviews Dr Andy Goodwin, Advanced Materials Advisor, and Warwick Grigor, Non-Executive Chairman of First Graphene on their fire retardant additive at the IDTechEx Show! Europe 2018.