Printed Electronics!!

While I was enjoying my vacation back home, I had a chit-chat with my dad about his recent trip to Germany. He just briefed me about his work there and started explaining about the new clients he had met there. Then, he asked me if I had ever seen an electronic biz card. After thinking for a while, I said no. He pulled off a biz card and a card reader. The card resembled a normal biz card and the card reader looked like an USB enabled hand held device. On inserting the card into the reader, it opens the details of the company and directed me to its website. Wow, I loved that.

My dad was interested in knowing the business demand behind this and I was interested in understanding the technology behind that. After some amount of browsing, he came to know that the card reader costs as cheap as 15/-INR. I started digging into how it actually works. Then, my dad told me that the card is a normal card but a different ink was used to print it. Mr. Bing taught me a new word called "Printed Electronics". Then, I realized the fact that these cards were printed using special carbonated inks which can store certain amount of data like other magnetic devices.

Printed Electronics is a set of printing methods where in electrically functional circuits are printed and are made capable of storing some data. To know more about how it actually stores, refer this. This is an interesting research topic as this can change the way modern day computers are. Any advancement in this field will be highly significant, as this can be a good replacement for silicon chips and can be good to environment. The biz card which I saw had a storage capacity of around 16 KB.

Thanks dad for introducing me to it. Attaching the pics.



Update: As I was publishing this post, I came across an article about printable batteries. Read it here. How electronic inks work?

-- Varun