Friday 31 January 2014

Printed electronics are ubiquitous

The printed electronics market has seen exponential growth. By now, it has ballooned to over $300 bn globally.* This technology began with a small number of niche, high-end products. It expanded rapidly in the 2010s, thanks to plummeting costs and improved production methods. By the 2020s it had exploded into the mainstream – creating a new generation of ultra-thin electronics.
Today, these have such low fabrication costs that they are ubiquitous in countless everyday business and consumer applications.* Many previously bulky or heavy devices can now be folded, stored or carried as easily as sheets of paper. This includes flexible TV displays that can be rolled or hung like posters. Also widespread are electronic newspapers with moving pictures, "smart" packaging and labels with animated text, along with signage in retail outlets that can be updated shop-wide at the touch of a button.*
Multimedia players with expandable, fold-out touchscreens are especially popular. Even low-end models are now the size and weight of credit cards and can easily fit inside a wallet. With petabytes of storage, gigapixels of screen resolution and superfast transfer speeds, they are orders of magnitude more powerful than iPods of the previous decade. They are also completely wireless – no cables or physical connections of any kind are required, with music being enjoyed using wireless earphones.

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