This report focuses on the markets, requirements and current and emerging technologies of transparent conductors. Worldwide research and design efforts are presented, both from research institutes and companies that are developing the necessary materials and processes - in total 53 organizations are profiled. It covers metal oxides, organic materials, and emerging alternatives including inorganic meshes, carbon nanotubes, graphene and more. The penetration of these options into applications such as displays, photovoltaics and touch screens, and others, is given for the next 10 years.

Transparent conductive films are used for displays, some photovoltaics and touch screen modules. In 2012, 93% of the market uses Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) - which can be expensive depending on the current price of indium and is brittle, and barely flexible. Other metal oxides are used, particularly in some thin film photovoltaics which offer a cost advantage over ITO.

 

However, now there are many other emerging technologies, from finely printed conductive meshes, to layers of silver or copper that are highly transparent, to organic transparent conductors, and variations such as carbon nanotubes and graphene. This report assesses the technical progress of these options, and their market sweet spot (if any) and forecast penetration.

 

Each option has trade-offs between conductivity, cost, transmittance, and flexibility. Each can be patterned in different ways. While sputtering will remain an important and high-volume technology for coating of rigid substrates like glass, solution-based processes including printing and the use of organic and nanoparticle materials have already gained a lot of traction and are expected to dominate the market for the flexible applications within a few years. Significant new developments are being made with both the materials used and how they can be deposited. This report addresses the performance of the different options and profiles organizations around the world that are developing better solutions.

The biggest opportunity has been - and for the next decade will be - for displays, but this increasingly includes a wide range of displays including OLEDs, which is now the priority of companies such as Samsung.

 

While ESD (electro static discharge) applications have moderate requirements concerning the properties of TCFs, demands in devices such as OLEDs are more complex. The main reason is that in that case, not only the standard properties as conductivity, cost, transmittance and flexibility are important, but the interactions with other layers play an important role, namely charge carrier injection. In addition, for large area devices, homogeneity is more critical, especially when it comes to display and lighting applications. The human eye is more sensitive to changes in brightness than to changes in colour, and brightness of an light emitting device depends on the electrical conditions - voltage in the case of inorganic electroluminescence, current flow in the case of electrochromic and light-emitting semiconductors.

 

This report critically assesses these issues.

IDTechEx find that the market for TCFs will be $1.63 billion in 2012. This is the cost of the material used for the TCF, excluding the substrate and processing cost. It is based on a ground-up calculation of the material usage by each type of device, and benchmarking with results from exhaustive interviews of users and suppliers of TCFs. The report gives ten year forecasts by TCF technology, in addition to ten year forecasts of the TCF area required by application.

 

We study the processing cost of different options - for example, the material cost of Carbon Nanotubes (CNT) are similar to ITO but the structure of a CNT TCF is much simpler and much easier to make and therefore overall the CNT TCF, like for like, can be cheaper.

 

For those that seek to address opportunities in this field, learn the latest progress from around the world, the challenges and market potential, this report is a must. Activities of more than 53 organizations from across the globe are covered.

2.1. Transparent Conductive Oxides

2.2. Organic conductors

2.3. Metal layers and grids

3.1. Electromagnetic shielding and Electrostatic coating

3.2. Displays & Lighting

3.2.1. LC Displays

3.2.2. EL Lamps and Displays

3.2.3. OLED Lighting and displays

3.3. Touch Screens

3.4. Photovoltaics

3.4.1. Crystalline Silicon

3.4.2. Thin film and Organic PV

3.5. Security Applications

4.2. Transparency

4.3. Conductivity

4.4. Flexibility

4.5. Cost

4.5.1. Patterning Cost ITO vs CNTs

4.6. Other parameters

5.1. Doped oxide metals

5.1.1. ITO Challenges: Cost and availability

5.1.2. Evolution of pricing for ITO

5.2. Organic Conductors

5.2.1. Evolution of conductivity of transparent organic materials

5.3. Metallic nanoparticles (silver and copper)

5.4. Carbon Nanotubes and Graphene

5.4.1. Carbon Nanotubes

5.4.2. Graphene

5.5. Hybrids: Metal grids with transparent organic material

6.1. TCOs

6.1.1. Vacuum processes

6.1.2. Wet processes

6.1.3. Patterning of TCO layers

6.1.4. Recent developments: Printable ITO

6.2. Deposition of Organic Materials

6.3. Nanomaterials

6.3.1. Metallic nanoparticles

6.3.2. CNT and Graphene

7.1. Agfa Orgacon

7.2. Cambrios Technologies Corp.

7.3. Canatu Ltd.

7.4. Carestream Advanced Materials

7.5. Chasm Technologies

7.6. Cheil Industries

7.7. Chisso Corp.

7.8. Cima NanoTech

7.9. C3Nano

7.10. Dai Nippon Printing Co Ltd (DNP)

7.11. Dontech Inc.

7.12. Duke University

7.13. Eastman Kodak

7.14. Eikos

7.15. Evaporated Coatings Inc.

7.16. Evonik

7.17. Fujifilm Ltd

7.18. Gunze Ltd

7.19. Heraeus Clevios (formerly H.C. Starck Clevios)

7.20. Holst Center

7.21. Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences (ICES), Singapore

7.22. Join Well Technology Company Ltd.

7.23. KAIST

7.24. KPT Shanghai Keyan Phosphor Technology Co. Ltd.

7.25. Lee Tat Industrial Development (LTI) Ltd

7.26. LG Chem

7.27. Mianyang Prochema Plastics Co., Ltd.

7.28. Mitsui & Co. (U.S.A.), Inc., Mitsui Ltd., Japan

7.29. Nanoforge

7.30. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)

7.31. Nicanti

7.32. Nitto Denko

7.33. Oike & CO., Ltd.

7.34. Panipol Ltd

7.35. Polychem UV/EB

7.36. PolyIC

7.37. Rice University

7.38. Samsung Electronics, Korea

7.39. Sang Bo Corporation (SBK), Korea

7.40. Sigma-Aldrich

7.41. Sheldahl

7.42. Sony Corporation

7.43. Sumitomo Metal Mining Co., Inc.

7.44. Suzutora

7.45. Teijin Kasei America, Inc. / Teijin Chemical

7.46. Top Nanosys

7.47. Toray Advanced Film (TAF)

7.48. Toyobo

7.49. UCLA

7.50. Unidym

7.51. University of Michigan

7.52. VisionTek Systems Ltd.

7.53. XinNano Materials, Inc., Taiwan

8.1. The potential significance of organic and printed inorganic electronics

8.2. Forecasts for flexible electronics 2012-2022

8.3. TCFs market size 2012-2022

8.4. Market by TCF Technology Type

1.1. Market share of transparent conductive films

1.2. Total Area of TCFs by application type, in Km Squared, 2012-2022

1.3. Transparent Conductive Film market 2012-2022 US$ millions

1.4. Market by technology type 2012-2022 US$ millions

1.5. Market value $ billions of only flexible/conformal electronics 2012-2022

3.1. Touch screen technologies

3.2. Percentage of material costs for each of the main layers of the organic PV device

4.1. TCF requirements for different applications

4.2. Main criteria to assess for TCFs

4.3. Comparison of TCF material of Heraeus Clevios and ITO films

8.1. Leading market drivers 2022

8.2. Market value $ billions of only flexible/conformal electronics 2012-2022

8.3. Total market value of flexible vs. non-flexible electronics 2012-2022 US$ billion

8.4. Total Area of TCFs by application type, in Km Squared, 2012-2022

8.5. Transparent Conductive Film market 2012-2022 US$ millions

8.6. Market by technology type 2012-2022 US$ millions

1.1. Flexible OLED fabricated using IMREs high barrier substrate and encapsulation technique

1.2. Flexible Solar Cell developed by Fraunhofer IPMS

1.3. Total Area of TCFs by application type, in Km Squared, 2012-2022

1.4. Transparent Conductive Film market 2012-2022 US$ millions

1.5. Market by technology type 2012-2022 US$ millions

1.6. Opportunities for PEDOT in the display industry

1.7. Market value $ billions of only flexible/conformal electronics 2012-2022

2.1. Conductivity of several materials

3.1. Structure of a TFT-LCD

3.2. PolyDisplay's see through display

3.3. EL display for a car dashboard

3.4. Cross section of an EL display

3.5. Two types of OLED construction

3.6. Constructions of Inorganic PV cells

3.7. Materials investigated for organic photovoltaics

3.8. Flexible electronics

3.9. Efficiency of TCF vs Cell Size

3.10. Indium migration vs other TCFs

4.1. Relationship between resistance and transparency

4.2. Flex testing of ITO on foil

4.3. Cost to pattern ITO vs CNTs for a touch panel

5.1. Cost of ITO and global ITO production

5.2. Global Indium Production in 2010

5.3. PEDOT:PSS conductivity development

5.4. Structure of single-walled carbon nanotubes

5.5. The chiral vector is represented by a pair of indices (n, m). T denotes the tube axis, and a1 and a2 are the unit vectors of graphene in real space.

5.6. Cell size and efficiency

5.7. Indium migration vs TCF alternatives

6.1. Comparison of OLED performance. The top electrode made of printed ITO

7.1. Conductive grid design showing Aluminum on PET substrate

7.2. Directly produced prepatterned films

7.3. Yielded cost per unit area of TCF for touch panel applications

7.4. Tiny copper wires can be built in bulk and then "printed" on a surface to conduct current, transparently.

7.5. Eastman Kodak HCF Film

7.6. Opportunity for PEDOT in the Display industry

7.7. Performance of PEDOT formulation from Eastman Kodak versus ITO

7.8. CNT Ink Production Process

7.9. Target application areas of Eikos

7.10. Gunze's flexible display, presented early 2009

7.11. Overview: Application areas of Clevios material

7.12. Efficiency of TCF vs Cell Size

7.13. Indium migration vs other TCFs

7.14. The owners of Nicanti

7.15. Nicanti Printaf project

7.16. TCF solutions from Panipol

7.17. Polychem PEDOT Polymer Coating

7.18. Patterned Sample by the New Technology

7.19. JEFF FITLOW -Yu Zhu, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University, holds a sample of a transparent electrode that merges graphene and a fine aluminum grid

7.20. A hybrid material that combines a fine aluminum mesh with a single-atom-thick layer of graphene

7.21. An electron microscope image of a hybrid electrode developed at Rice University

7.22. Teijin's ELECLEAR ITO film

7.23. VisionTek Systems TCF materials

8.1. Leading market drivers 2022

8.2. Market value $ billions of only flexible/conformal electronics 2012-2022

8.3. Total market value of flexible versus non-flexible electronics 2012-2022 in US$ billion

8.4. Total Area of TCFs by application type, in Km Squared, 2012-2022

8.5. Transparent Conductive Film market 2012-2022 US$ millions

8.6. Market by technology type 2012-2022 US$ millions