Printable Electronics for market transformation

NRC's Printable Electronics (PE) initiative provides Canadian industry with the resources and networks it needs to become a global powerhouse. Our efforts involve coordinating key industrial areas – including materials, ink, printing, ICT and digital manufacturing – to develop them into a springboard for a profitable, large-scale PE sector. Working with commercial partners, we're establishing a product development and demonstration capability that will give Canadian designers and manufacturers a crucial competitive edge in producing PE items for world markets.

Partnership opportunity

NRC is seeking new partners for the PE Consortium (PEC). We also offer fee-for-service (FFS) work for non-consortium partners in a variety of sectors.

Our current research priorities encompass three areas:

• Functional Materials: Conductive and semiconducting ink, scalable processes
• Functional Devices: Logic circuits, memory, conductors, radio-frequency identification (RFID) and near-field communication (NFC)
• Functional Imprinting: Innovative interactive optical features for security printing

PE presents a transformative opportunity to add intelligence to printed products. Our goal is to develop PE solutions that will use new functional materials and print-based production processes to enable lower-cost digital manufacturing of ubiquitous electronic devices, transforming industries and creating new markets.

Partner benefits

PEC partners collaborate with leading members of the Canadian Printable Electronics industry to conduct product-driven applied research. They gain access to comprehensive PE solutions, both from NRC and through other consortium members, securing a significant competitive advantage. Our FFS customers are able to leverage NRC’s unique expertise (in materials, processes and devices) and to access our state-of-the-art equipment, some of which is not available anywhere else in North America.

For printers or packaging firms looking to add value to their existing offering, PE offers the opportunity to add smarts to everyday objects, leading to higher impact marketing campaigns, more intimate connections with customers and an extremely high level of product differentiation.

In the long term, NRC partners will benefit by being positioned as early adopters of emerging PE solutions, ultimately becoming global leaders in the field.

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