The Future of electronics is plastic

18 July 2005 00:01  [Source: ICB Americas]

Driven by the need to protect sensitive electronic devices, the market for electrically conductive polymers compounded from thermoplastics and conductive fillers is large and healthy. At the same time, a complementary market for polymers that conduct electricity without the assistance of fillers is quickly emerging. The subject of a Nobel prize in 2000, these “inherently conductive polymers” (ICPs) are making their own contribution to the protection of electronics even while they draw headlines as the basis for devices of the future such as electronic paper, lightweight solar cells, and inexpensive radio-frequency identification tags.

Though appealing, such applications are in their infancy, and the overall contribution of ICPs to the conductive polymer market is relatively small, according to Conductive Polymers, a study by Business Communications Company of Norwalk, Conn. Approximately 128.5 million pounds of conductive polymers, with a value of $745 million, were sold in North America alone in 2003, says BCC. The total was dominated by compounds, which contributed 125 million pounds, valued at $605 million. ICPs contributed only 3.5 million pounds to the total, but with a high unit price, their total value came to $140 million.

BCC puts the North American market’s average annual growth at 9.8 percent through 2008, when it will reach a total volume of 205.3 million pounds, valued at $1.5 billion. Compounds will grow a solid 8.7 percent per year to a total volume of 190 million pounds, valued at $909 million. ICPs, by contrast, are seeing spectacular growth: 34.3 percent per year, on average, to reach 15.3 million pounds with a value of $610 million in 2008.

Conductive fillers

Compounded conductive polymers play a critical role in the successful proliferation and miniaturization of electronic devices, because they provide an inexpensive means of protecting against the threat of electrostatic discharge and electromagnetic or radio frequency interference. Major players in this sector include Noveon Static Control, RTP Company, GE Plastics, and Kloeckner Pentaplast.

To give polymers, which are typically insulators, varying degrees of conductivity, these companies draw on a collection of traditional conductive fillers, although carbon black, the least expensive, is most widely used. For instance, RTP also employs carbon and stainless steel fiber and nickel-coated graphite. GE’s Stat-Kon, Faradex and EMI-X products use carbon and stainless steel. Noveon’s Hipscon products use carbon. To improve the performance of polymer compounds, however, a new class of additives called inherently dissipative polymers, or IDPs, have been developed. Other companies offer compounds with IDPs, including GE, RTP and Noveon.

IDPs address a particular range of resistivity needs, notes Neil Hardwick, marketing manager at Noveon. The difference between a dissipative material and a conductive material, he explains, is simply the former’s higher resistivity, which enables it to release a charge more slowly—useful if small energy surges are a concern. Chemically unrelated to ICPs, Noveon’s IDP is melt-processable and easily used with thermoplastics, whereas ICPs are more difficult.

Compounders are nonetheless increasingly interested in ICPs, which can address a lower range of resistivity and other performance requirements. Noveon has begun working with them, and its new ICP-based coatings line will include coated sheet as well as general coatings when it makes its commercial debut by the end of summer. Hardwick believes that Noveon’s entry will be the first to make ICP coatings widely affordable. “I think that the key to ICP-coated products’ succeeding is coming out with a reasonable price point, and that’s what we’re trying to do he says. “Having an internal source changes the playing field a bit for us, versus people who are buying things from outside suppliers. We don’t manufacture ICPs ourselves, but we do the coating carriers, as well as the formulation, so it’s a different approach than people have taken in the past.”

RTP has been compounding with ICPs for several years. Although the sensitivity of ICPs to heat presents a processing challenge, they do offer certain advantages over traditional fillers, including improved electrical, mechanical and flow properties, and in 2000, RTP began commercially supplying thermoplastic specialty alloys of them several years ago. Another compounder, PolyOne Corp., licenses ICP technology from NASA as the basis for its Catize corrosion-control additives and its Teslart ICPs.

ICPs were discovered in the late 1970s by Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa. Awarded the Nobel prize for their work in 2000, these scientists found that conjugated polymers such as polyacetylene became conductive when “doped” with electron donors or receptors. Since then, the performance of ICPs and doping systems has vastly increased. The most common polymers used for modern ICPs are polyaniline, polypyrrole, polythiophene, polyethylenedioxythiophene, and poly(p-phenylenevinylene).

Plastic electronics

Much of the excitement surrounding ICPs stems from their potential as alternatives to silicon-based electronics. “We believe that ‘plastic’ electronics, based on thin-film transistors fabricated using organic films, offer some radically new directions for electronics including the creation of a range of entirely new products that could not be manufactured using conventional CMOS [complementary metal oxide semiconductor] approaches,” says Lawrence Gasman, principal analyst at NanoMarkets, in a recent study, Plastic Electronics Markets: A Technology Analysis and Eight-Year Forecast.

“The flexibility of thin-films themselves suggest new product directions, including roll-up displays, very low cost RFIDs [radio-frequency identification tags], and flexible sensor and photovoltaic arrays,” he adds. “Plastic electronics also generate very little heat and use small amounts of power, alleviating major problems that dog conventional electronics.”

The economics of plastic electronics will be much more attractive than CMOS manufacturing, he says. “There is no need to build fabs costing billions of dollars. Instead, a new paradigm is being created in which electronic circuits are printed using ink-jet technologies, stamping or some other similar process. This means that plastic electronics products could be produced economically in relatively short runs and even customized to the needs to low-volume customers.”

The potential for inherently conductive polymers is such that for a growing number of companies, ICPs are a core technology. For example, RTP obtains its ICP technology through an exclusive North American licensing agreement with Panipol Ltd., a Parvoo, Finland-based company specializing in the development of polyaniline ICPs. Its product line, founded on work begun at Neste Chemicals in 1982, consists of melt-processable ICPs for dry-mixing and compounding, coating systems and conductive inks, and polyaniline raw materials.

Ormecon GmbH, headquartered in Ammersbek, Germany, holds a good deal of intellectual property surrounding polyaniline ICPs, and indeed acquired a minority share in Panipol as well as a royalty stream from Panipol to resolve a patent dispute in 2001. Other licensees of Ormecon’s IP include Bayer AG, DuPont, Covion and Avecia (both now transferred to Merck), and Nissan Chemical Industries. Ormecon is working with other ICPs as well.

Bernhard Wessling, president, managing partner and CEO of Ormecon, says the company now employs about 60 people worldwide. “Around 75 percent of our turnover is generated with a process family called ‘Ormecon CSN,’” used in the manufacture of printed circuit boards (PCBs). “The remaining 25 percent are generated with various other products for corrosion protection, antistatic and conductive coatings, for the manufacturing of (inorganic) electroluminescent devices etc.” Ormecon is also targeting applications such as OLEDs, polymer electronics, capacitors, EMI shielding, organic solar cells and sensors.

“In the PCB market, we are experiencing tremendous growth right now—mainly in Asia, but also Europe and the US—we are hiring people like crazy, and are confident [we will] increase our world market share significantly,” says Wessling. For the last two years, Ormecon has been adding production capacity, including a new production and sales joint venture in Colorado. The company is also opening a Chinese operation later this summer.

ICP innovators

Bayer holds a major position in the ICP market through its H.C. Starck GmbH subsidiary, which markets the thiophene-based Baytron line. Baytron M is the monomer 3,4-ethylenedioxythiopene; Baytron P is poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)polystyrenesulfonate. Discovered in 1988, the products have been developed in special grades, says Klaus Lerch, marketing manager, functional materials, electronics and optics business group of H.C. Starck. Baytron has been produced at multiton scale since 1998, and the company targets a wide range of applications, he says, including antistatic coatings, displays, capacitors and PCBs.

Merck KGaA made a leap of its own into ICPs with the recent acquisition of Covion Organic Semiconductors GmbH and Avecia’s polymer electronics R&D unit in Manchester, UK. Based in Frankfurt am Main, Covion, working with Phillips, has developed conductive polymers that emit light for use in displays—PLEDs, or polymer light-emitting diodes, based on poly(p-phenylenevinylenes) and poly(p-phenylenes).

ICP companies in the US include Pinole, Calif.-based Eeonyx Corp. Founded in 1994, Eeonyx is focused on two proprietary technologies, Eeonomer and EeonTex. Eeonomer addresses the temperature instability of ICPs, which are typically suitable for processing only into lower-melting plastics (up to 200°C), notes Jamshid Avloni, president. However, if the ICPs (based on polyaniline or polypyrrole) are prepared by in situ polymerization and deposition into a carbon black matrix, they are stable to 300°C, so that they can be processed into most plastics and thermosets in use without any loss of conductivity. “Tunable,” Eeonomers provide improved electrical, mechanical and melt flow properties. EeonTex refers to a proprietary process in which the individual fibers within a fabric or yarn are completely and uniformly coated with polypyrrole-based ICP.

Another US company, Pittsburgh-based Plextronics, was founded three years ago to commercialize the discoveries of Richard McCullough, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Its technology, Plexcore, is centered on “regioregular” polythiophenes, or RRPTs, with higher solubilities than other ICPs for easier use, and novel copolymer technologies for better physical and conductive properties. Although Plextronics had originally pursued a partnership with Sherwin-Williams aimed at the coatings market, the company is now focused entirely on organic electronics, where ICPs can enable entirely new products, rather than improved versions of existing products, says Andrew Hannah, president, CEO and co-founder. In March the company announced an R&D agreement in conjunction with Elo TouchSystems to develop next generation touch screen technology. Plextronics has already brought its first IPC to market, P3HT, or poly(3-hexylthiophene), under the Plexcore OS brand, and is receiving orders.

Tremendous growth opportunities

The most exciting product Plextronics has in development is a transparent hole-injection layer (HIL) for P-LED displays, says Hannah. To be released by the end of this year or early next, the ink is non-acidic and solvent-based, two characteristics necessary for high performance. Another promising market for the company is solar cells, he says, noting that the company recently received a related $300,000 research contract from the Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority. Between solar cells in hand-held devices and in roof-top shingles, he favors the latter opportunity in the short term, given the lower efficiency required. RFIDs are a tremendous opportunity, as well, with the cost per unit for inventory control falling to a penny by the end of the decade, he projects.

Other ICP manufacturers are Sumitomo, which just acquired Dow’s light-emitting polymers business, and Central Corp.

NanoMarkets sees the most immediate electronics opportunity in the display market, which the Sterling, Va.-based firm valued at $53.8 million globally. Small displays are already present in cameras, and rigid electronic paper displays are used in stores. NanoMarkets projects that flexible “full-sized” displays will be available in 2007. The display market will climb to $931 million that year and reach $6.7 billion in 2012.

Nanomarkets sees polymer memory, which offers simple construction, low cost, high density and capacity and very low power requirements, growing from $13.6 million this year to $307 million in 2007 and $10.3 billion in 2012. Flexible solar panels are expected to grow from $2.8 million now to $2.4 billion in 2012.

Including other segments of the plastic electronics market—processors/logic, interconnects and sensors, Nanomarkets projects a total market value of $23.5 billion in 2012, compared to its present value of $70 million.

ICIS Copyright © Reed Business Information 2009

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