Dec 19 2007
The market for organic electronics materials will be worth $4.9 billion in 2012 surging to $15.8 billion in 2015, according to a new report from NanoMarkets, an industry analyst firm based here.
The report, "Organic Harvest: Opportunities in Organic Electronic Materials" is the next in a series that analyzes the market for the semiconductors, conductors, dielectrics and substrates that will be used in the growing organic electronics industry. Details about the report can be found at www.nanomarkets.net. The firm has also released a blog entry that provides additional commentaries from the report at www.nanotopblog.com. Report summaries are available for members of the press upon request.
From the Report:
By 2015, NanoMarkets estimates that 80 percent of organic electronics materials will be sold into three applications: RFID, display backplanes and OLED lighting and displays. By then RFID will be the largest application accounting for $6.9 billion in materials sales, with today's dominant application - OLEDs accounting for $5.6 billion. NanoMarkets expect RFID to overtake OLEDs as the largest consumer of organic electronics materials by 2012.
Today's organic semiconductor materials are inadequate for the opportunity that lies ahead. Besides their limits on performance, many of them are only available in small quantities. However, NanoMarkets believes that new kinds of organic semiconductor materials such as rubrene and hybrid materials including formulations with carbon nanotubes are going to enable the market to achieve $4.9 billion in revenues by 2015 as needed improvements in electron mobilities, switching speeds and environmental stability are attained.
To be successful, organic electronics will have to emulate the traditional semiconductor industry and invent an organic version of CMOS with its own stable materials sets. To make this happen materials companies must offer commercial quantities of n-type semiconductors and organic dielectrics.
The substrate business will grow to $6.9 billion in sales by 2015 with the majority of these substrates of the flexible type and specially prepared for organic electronics through novel forms of barrier coatings and reduced surface roughness.
As the organic electronics industry starts to ship devices in quantity, material suppliers will have to adjust their formulations for their offerings to work in large-scale manufacturing plants. These plants now seem more likely to use versions of traditional evaporation, coating and flexo printing, rather than the much touted ink-jet approaches. Suppliers will have to meet the specialized requirements for viscosity, volatility, etc., that the emerging organic electronics industry will require.