New Report Analyzes and Forecasts the Market for OTFTs and Organic Memories and Assesses Its Likely Future Success and Challenges

Business Wire, Nov 23, 2007

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c75314) has announced the addition of Next Chips: Organic Transistors and Memories and the Applications They Will Enable to their offering.

Some observers now believe that thin film, organic and printed (TOP) electronics will grow into an industry rivaling today's semiconductor industry in size within a couple of decades. For this to happen new types of semiconductor devices transistors and memories will have to be developed and commercialized. At the present time, the most likely materials platform for this type of device would seem to be organic materials.

Organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) are found in backplanes for e-paper devices and games that one can buy today and they have been used in RFID demonstrators. Organic memories were proposed as a flash memory replacement a few years back, but are seeing a revival in a slightly different form for the TOP environment. A handful of firms are pledged to take such devices to the next stage and embed them in a wide range of novel devices and applications. Meanwhile, there is extensive research being undertaken, especially in Asia, to improve the performance of organic transistors and memories, which will help to extend their market reach further.

And these devices certainly are in need of further development. Much of the activity is still at the level of device architectures and showing that devices can be manufactured in at least pilot plant quantities. While their potential is huge, the reality is often far less impressive. Conductivity of organic materials is low and this is reflected in their slow switching speeds which in turn limits their applications. Most of the commercial products and demonstrators that use OTFTs have, at best, very modest performance. A fairly similar story can be told with regard to organic memories. Indeed, important voices have been raised in support of an alternative future in which TOP electronics will ultimately progress using inorganic devices made from printed silicon, carbon nanotubes, etc. rather than OTFTs and organic memories.

This report analyzes and forecasts the market for OTFTs and organic memories and assesses its likely future success and challenges. It provides an in-depth review of current commercialization and research programs and provides a roadmap for the development of both OTFTs/organic memories and the applications/products in which they will be used. In addition, the report contains detailed forecasts of both OTFTs and organic memories in both volume and value terms, broken out both by application and by technology type. This is an applications and device oriented technology assessment and is intended to complement NanoMarkets' new market research report on organic electronics materials. The report is based on extensive interviews with the movers and shakers in the TOP electronics community, as well as extensive secondary research including an analysis of patents filed by leading firms active in this space.

Companies Mentioned:

3M

Acreo

AMD

Asahi Kasei

Canon

Dai Nippon Printing

ETH Zurich

FASL, Inc

Hewlett-Packard

Hitachi

IBM

Infineon

Innos

Intel

Konica Minolta

LG Chem

LG Philips

Matsushita

Motorola

NHK

ORFID

OrganicID

Philips

Pioneer

Plastic Logic

PolyIC

Polymer Vision

printed systems

Ricoh

Samsung

Sarnoff Corporation

Seiko Epson

Sony

Spansion

ST Microelectronics

Xerox (including Xerox PARC and Xerox Research Centre of Canada)

ZettaCore

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c75314