The challenge
Creating reliable, cost-effective flexible electronics
Ultra-thin and flexible electronics that you can bend, flex and wrap around your arm, will transform the way we make and use electronic devices.
Imagine portable electronic devices where the plastic casing incorporates a solar cell – flat batteries will be a thing of the past.
Imagine a rollout or foldout screen from your mobile phone that allows you to watch full colour television, a movie, read the newspaper or your favourite novel in an easy-to-read, flexible A4-sized format.
Flexible electronics are giving rise to an array of exciting new products. And, with a market that's estimated to grow from A$16 billion in 2013 to A$77 billion in 2023, flexible electronics are a huge commercial opportunity for Australian manufacturers.
In order to accelerate these technologies to market, we need to adapt materials and processes for making electronic components, such as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), transistors and solar cells, on flexible surfaces like plastic in a reliable and cost-effective manner.
Our response
Developing the science and creating big opportunities for manufacturing
We're helping turn ideas into reality using world-leading and emerging technologies, adding value to manufacturers and creating a new wave of niche industries based on nanotechnology.
Our people and facilities provide an end-to-end solution for the design, development and production of new flexible electronics materials and products.
We lower the barriers to entry for our clients by:
- helping to form supply chains
- de-risking the technology
- mitigating capital investment
- providing hands-on training and open access to commercial scale equipment - accelerating the time to market for new technologies.
We draw on our expertise in chemistry to develop lightweight printed solar cells and new materials for organic lighting and electronics, and then test the devices to investigate and optimise their performance.
All of our materials and processes are developed with a view to manufacturability, and materials are synthesised using low-cost starting materials and scalable synthesis routes.
Our processes use inexpensive off-the-shelf equipment adapted to fabricate devices using scalable methods, which are compatible with the low-cost manufacture of large area, flexible electronics.