Thursday, April 13, 2006
Thin Film Electronics AB, formerly the Swedish research wing of Norwegian company Opticom ASA, has been separated from its now defunct parent and has re-applied itself to the production of low-cost all-polymer nonvolatile rewritable memories.
The company has also re-aligned to pursue RFID, smart label, packaging, authentication and identification applications rather than the large-scale silicon-based general purpose memory it had previously investigated under research contracts with Intel Corp. (Santa Clara).
Thin Film Electronics (Linkoping, Sweden) is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Thin Film NewCo ASA (Oslo, Norway) and as a demonstration of its technology and new direction it has presented an electronic memory manufactured entirely using industrial inkjet printing techniques and equipment. The work was carried out in collaboration with Xaar plc (Cambridge, England), a manufacturer of inkjet printheads, and with an unnamed manufacturing and development site in Jarfalla, Sweden.
The demonstrator has arrays of up to 100 bits and was constructed using a line width of 220-microns. TFE and Xaar achieved a read/write endurance of 100,000 cycles on the demonstrator.
While the geometry is three orders of magnitude of coarser than contemporary silicon manufacture, the two companies stressed in a presentation that they are not at a scaling limit of the technology and relatively small memories may be appropriate for RFID, labeling and authentication applications.
At the conclusion of a presentation of the demonstrator circuit the presenters called on end-users to approach TFE and Xaar to develop printed memories for particular applications.
By: DocMemory
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