News Article
New NanoMarkets report predicts US$15.8 billion organic electronics materials market in 2015
The market for organic electronics materials will be worth US$4.9 billion in 2012 surging to US$15.8 billion in 2015, according to a new report from NanoMarkets, an industry analyst firm.
The report, "Organic Harvest: Opportunities in Organic Electronic Materials" is the next in a series that analyses the market for the semiconductors, conductors, dielectrics and substrates that will be used in the growing organic electronics industry.
The report states that by 2015, NanoMarkets estimates that 80% 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 US$6.9 billion in materials sales, with today's dominant application, OLEDs accounting for US$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 US$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 US$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 specialised requirements for viscosity, volatility, etc., that the emerging organic electronics industry will require.
