POINTS · Printable Organic-Inorganic Transparent Semiconductor Devices

Europe is targeting a global leadership in the field of printed electronics (PE). This industry is expected to grow to a market size of 47 billion USD by 2018 (Figure 1) with a long-time potential of 300 billion USD by 2030 as estimated by IDTechEx [1,2,48]. The growth rates of the PE industry are expected to be comparable to those of silicon industry in past (inset of Figure 1). This is an ambitious goal for Europe with strong global competition, for example, from Kovio Inc. [54] (US), Nanosolar [53] (US) and Paru Co [50] (Korea). The POINTS project combines the multidisciplinary and complementary competences of top-level European research groups and industries in order to make a significant step towards the above strategic target. For this purpose, the project objectives are set to make break-through advances in the state of the art in terms of new low-temperature printable materials with enhanced performance. This is achieved through combining the best properties of organic and inorganic materials into hybrid structures at both the molecular and at structural-interface level. The POINTS approach is guided by the recent research discoveries of the project partners. Furthermore, expertise of the consortium in cost-efficient mass fabrication processes is coupled to the materials development to obtain optimum performance and processability. Industrial relevancy of the work is assured by selected test structures of industrial interest for ICT applications.