The NanoMarkets TOP Blog

New White Paper On Materials for Thin Film and Organic Photovoltaics Available

Tue, 13 May 2008 11:35:00 -0700

We have published a new white paper on the NanoMarkets website that addresses the opportunities and challenges for materials suppliers in the thin film and organic photovoltaics sector. It examines each of the major materials classes used in this sector and discusses where the most profitable areas are likely to be found for specialty chemicals firms and similar firms. It also takes a look at the evolving relationship between materials suppliers and solar panel manufacturers and the factors for materials suppliers to take into consideration in assessing the size and growth of the opportunities available to them. The markets for photoactive materials are the primary concern of this paper, but it also discusses the market for contact materials and other materials used in the "new PV."

Click here if you would like to access the file.

Five Opportunities for ITO Replacement

Thu, 08 May 2008 10:16:00 -0700

NanoMarkets has issued a new white paper titled, "Five Opportunities for ITO Replacement". You can access the document via the following url: http://www.nanomarkets.net/resources/ITOWhitePaper.pdf or by clicking here

Five Opportunities for ITO Replacement

There is a market for low-performance transparent conductors that Indium Tin Oxide or ITO only marginally competes in. This market consists primarily in certain conductive coatings. For example, tin oxide is used in large amounts as an IR protective coating for architectural glass. However, when this low end of the transparent conductor market is excluded, the analysis above would tend to suggest that everything in the transparent conductor business would seem likely to be dominated by ITO for some time to come and that there will be few new opportunities unless one happens to be in the ITO business already and can simply climb up the growth curve with everyone else. Or if one happens to have a revolutionary new way to extract indium and/or process it into ITO products.

However, as firms in the transparent conductor business-including some with materials offerings that do not involve ITO-are quickly beginning to realize, this static view of the transparent conductor market is not accurate. There are five key opportunities in which transparent conductors are used and in which ITO doesn't quite meet the necessary specs.

In the first two of these opportunities-touch-screen displays and flexible displays-ITO is limited by its tendency to crack or break. In the third opportunity-printable electronics-ITO is limited by the ability of the industry to turn ITO into a high-performance conductive ink. In the fourth of these opportunities-solid-state lighting-ITO has been widely used as a transparent conductor for electroluminescent (EL) lighting for quite some time, but it is an open question as to whether it would be the transparent conductor of choice for the emerging area of OLED lighting. Finally, there is thin film photovoltaics, an area where ITO has never really established a presence and there may be better materials to do the job.

Flexible displays, OLED lighting and printed electronics have a certain niche-like character at the present time. This will change; both areas have the potential to generate quite sizeable amounts of transparent conductor demand in the future. Thin-film photovoltaics is only just emerging from a niche status. Touch-screen displays are already a large and growing market. All four areas are generating a demand for transparent conductors that have different characteristics than ITO classic can provide.

Organic Photovoltaic Markets, Chapter One Available

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:22:00 -0700

Click to access full chapter.

Photovoltaics of all kinds have excited the imagination of researchers, investors, and business people over the past four or five years as general energy prices have crept closer to those of PV. A decade ago, PV seemed merely niche-like opportunity for use in the sunniest climes and for applications that the grid did not easily reach; traffic lights, swimming pools and electric fences. Today, PV is being touted as a possible long-term supplier of up to 20 percent of the world's energy. PV has gone through booms before and there can be little doubt that it is being somewhat hyped today. But there seems no likelihood of a significant decline in the cost of traditional energy sources any time soon. This time the PV opportunity seems to have "legs."

It is no surprise then that money that is now being poured into the PV sector by businesses large and small, by investors and even by consumers and that this has prompted a surge of interest in research of new photoactive materials. Until recently, almost 100 percent of solar cells were based on crystalline silicon (c-Si), the only major exception being the thin-film amorphous silicon (a-Si) material used for "solar calculators." In the past few years, however, other thin-film materials, notably CIS/CIGS mixes and CdTe, have also started to be used and many plants around the world are now coming on stream that will manufacture solar panels using these newer materials.

The attraction of these materials is that they are (at least potentially) low-cost, low-weight and easier to manufacture than conventional PV. They have also had the advantage that PV manufacturers that use them have been able to avoid competing with the semiconductor industry for crystalline silicon. This shortage is, however, a problem that has now all but disappeared as silicon materials companies have ramped up production to meet the needs of the PV industry. The biggest challenge of thin-film PV is now getting the energy conversion ratios to a point where thin-film PV can compete directly with crystalline silicon PV in large addressable markets.

Hip Wallpaper?

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:55:00 -0700

Techradar.com posted a story this week on luminescent wallpaper that uses silver and ITO.

Not an application that we considered in two recent reports we have released but perhaps it might be that thing that gives Grandma's house a more modern look.

Check out www.jonassamson.com for more on the inventor.

New white paper on nanocrystalline silicon and silicon inks

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:54:00 -0700

We've just issued a new white paper titled Nanocrystalline Silicon/Silicon Inks. The paper was drawn from a previously issued NanoMarkets report, Opportunities for Nanocrystalline Silicon and Silicon Inks in Electronics that analyzes and forecasts the prospects for organic electronics materials in the coming eight years.

About the Paper
The new white paper examines the promising efforts to print silicon materials with the goal of achieving cost/performance breakthroughs in the areas of computer memories, RFID, display backplanes, lighting and photovoltaics. It explores how printed silicon compares to alternative paradigms, especially organic electronics, and how it can be made to fit into a market that is increasingly moving to flexible substrates. The paper also takes a look at the development directions of some of the leading edge firms in the printed silicon space.

You can download a copy of the a paper here.

The promising future of e-paper

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:57:00 -0700

We'll soon be releasing a new report soon that expands our coverage of the market opportunities for e-Paper displays, The Future of E-Paper: A Technology Assessment and Market Forecast.

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader is selling well. Rollable e-paper displays will be on the market this year. Serious progress is being made towards color e-paper displays. Clearly, e-paper is now well on its way to becoming a viable consumer technology. This new report analyzes the new market environment for e-paper, assesses the latest technology and provides a quantitative and qualitative forecast for shipments of e-paper products of all kinds ranging from book readers and flexible mobile displays to signage and smart shelving.

Download a free preview of the report from our website here.

New NanoMarkets whitepaper: Opportunities in Organic Electronics Markets

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:28:00 -0700

We’ve issued a new white paper titled Opportunities in Organic Electronics Markets. The paper was drawn from the NanoMarkets report, Organic Harvest: Opportunities in Organic Electronic Materials, that analyzes and forecasts the prospects for organic electronics materials in the coming eight years.

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More on Silver Inks and Pastes for Printed Electronics

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:10:00 -0700

NanoMarkets has announced a new upcoming report titled, Silver Inks and Pastes for Printable Electronics: 2008-2015. The following entry is an initial perspective on the silver inks and pastes market.

Silver inks and pastes continue to occupy a unique position in the printable electronics industry. They are still the only printed materials that have been mainstreamed and are widely used to create electrodes in a variety of applications, using screen printing mostly. Membrane switches, automotive heaters, capacitors, conductive tracks in PCBs, and conventional (i.e., not thin-film) photovoltaics all routinely use printed silver and printed silver is also used for certain classes of EMI shielding. Together such applications will account for hundreds of millions of dollars in silver inks and pastes in 2008. Applications in the display industry and especially in RFID antennas, a product that could end up being sold in billions are not too far off into the future. Today, there may be as many as 20 firms currently supplying silver inks for electronic applications.

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Printing could add to the cost effectiveness of OLEDs in lighting applications

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 07:04:00 -0700

Lighting utilizing organic light emitting diodes (OLED) could benefit from printing as a manufacturing technique because it can add to its cost effectiveness, says our newest printable electronics report, Printable Electronics Market Outlook: Printed Lighting.

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Printed RFID could achieve accepted commercial use by 2010

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:10:00 -0700

According to a our new report, Printable Electronics Outlook: Printed RFID, radio frequency identification (RFID) can achieve a functionality that would make it possible to be used for simple inventory management and logistics management by 2010.

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New NanoMarkets whitepaper: Thin-Film and Printed Batteries

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:27:00 -0700

We've released a new white paper titled Thin-Film and Printed Batteries: On Board Solutions for Low-Power Electronics. This paper discusses the value propositions that are emerging from the thin-film and printed battery area. [More]

Printing can help thin-film photovoltaics serve more purposes

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 09:08:00 -0700

According to our latest report,Printable Electronics Outlook: Photovoltaics, printing will serve as a key manufacturing strategy to help thin-film photovoltaics (TFPV) serve purposes in that cannot be created easily with traditional photovoltaics (PV).

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The past year was a formative year for printed displays.

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:05:00 -0700

This past year was the year that printed displays have become established as a commercial reality. Our new report,Printable Electronics Market Outlook: Displays, points especially to the first substantial shipments of The Sony® Reader.

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New white paper on thin film photovoltaics markets

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:52:00 -0700

We have released a new white paper titled Positioning Thin Film Photovoltaics for Success. The paper was drawn from a previously issued report that analyzed and forecasted the market for thin-film and organic photovoltaics, Materials Markets for Thin-Film and Organic Photovoltaics

About the Paper:
The white paper reviews the future of thin-film photovoltaics (TFPV), citing some of the latest market forecasts from NanoMarkets. It also examines the applications in which TFPV is most likely to succeed because of its advantages over conventional photovoltaics (PV), which use crystalline silicon as a core photoactive material. The varieties of thin-film covered in this article include amorphous silicon, CIS/CIGS, CdTe and organic PV/dye cells. Applications reviewed include utilities, building integrated systems and consumer electronics.

Visit our website at www.nanomarkets.net for more information out our photovoltaics research.

The Future of ITO: Transparent Conductor and ITO Replacement Markets

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:36:00 -0700

Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) has been the transparent conductor-of-choice for most display applications due to its superior combination of environmental stability, relatively low electrical resistivity and high transparency. The fact that it gets high marks on these performance characteristics has also meant that it has also become the benchmark for other emerging applications -- such as photovoltaics -- that need transparent conductors.

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