These secret successes underscore that the truth about how electronics are and will be printed is somewhat different from what a casual glance at the trade press or a set of conference proceedings might suggest. One might come away from such an experience, believing that it was all about ink jet. This would do an injustice to screen printing, which has few real advocates as such in the PE world, but is widely used and will continue to be. And it would certainly do an injustice to flexo printing, where NanoMarkets believes that flexo will certainly have a leg up on the other processes. In many ways, RFID is label printing with functionality and flexo prints labels very well—particularly narrow web flexo. Even lithography, which seems to have a lot working against it when it comes to PE, seems like it will have a role to play. The critical element is the printer expertise which enables the graphic arts skills to be translated into printing functional electronic products.

Reprinted with Permission from NanoMarkets