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Five Opportunities for
ITO Replacement
A NanoMarkets White Paper
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The following paper was drawn from the NanoMarkets report, The Future of ITO:
Transparent Conductor and ITO Replacement Markets
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Touch‐screen displays are now widely used on smart phones/PDAs, although not on all of
them and a few optimists believe that by late in the next decade, touch displays will be
used in as many as 40 percent of cell phones. (Our projections are more modest.) Touch‐
screen displays are already common on a wide variety of industrial handheld devices
ranging from ATMs and supermarket checkouts to the handheld device that one uses to
sign for packages delivered by UPS. And recently, one of the top selling video games has Page | 3
been Nintendo’s DS, which is equipped with a touch screen.
Touch screens fall into three categories. The vast majority are resistive touch screens.
These typically contain ITO‐on‐plastic‐foil separated by a spacer. When the screen is
touched, contact between the two ITO layers produces an electrical effect that is sent to a
controller. Capacitive touch screens are also in use and also use ITO‐coated substrates. In
this case, the material acts as a sensor that detects disturbances in the capacitive field
cause by contact. The final category of touch screens consist of a variety of technologies
that in some cases are barely out of the lab and are often aimed at the very high end of
the touch‐screen market.
Because of existing size and the expected growth of the touch‐screen market as a whole,
there are obviously considerable opportunities for ITO and its replacements in this market,
especially since the ITO used in the touch subsystem would be in addition to that used for
the display itself. Much of the interest is currently focused on the resistive display sector,
where there seems to be a need for a material that can perform reasonably well as a
transparent conductor, but which can stand more of a beating than can regular ITO.
Resistive touch displays behave well enough; as is witnessed by their widespread use. But
after a lot of use, micro‐cracking of the ITO layer gradually makes them less sensitive. This
matters a great deal in a commercial environment where touch screens are in constant
use. This is an area where we believe ITO is in danger of losing market share quite fast.
Commercial touch screens using PEDOT instead of ITO have already been built and sold by
Fujitsu. And resistive touch screens represent the market that is being actively targeted by
every firm with a conductive transparent nanomaterial. In talking with firms that have ITO
replacement products about where they planned to use their materials, inevitably touch
screens came up first.
As is typical with applications to which new technology firms have attributed a
considerable amount of significance, there is a strong likelihood that the issues in this
market are being oversold. For a start, many of the consumer products in which touch
screens are used simply do not see enough use for ITO to be especially problematic. The
obvious example would be in a cell phone; a product that is replaced every year to 18
months. Perhaps a similar comment could be made about video games. It is really in the
commercial sphere—where touch screens are used in ATMs, courier devices, etc.—that
problems arise. And these represent quite small volumes when compared to cell phones
and the like. It should also be realized that large touch screens—the kind used in kiosks
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and which could potentially use a lot of ITO—are quite rare. Finally, firms that are
interested in providing materials that are intended as replacements for ITO, tend to
downplay the possibility that touch displays other than resistive touch screens will be
widely used. They stress that these displays currently are barely out of the lab or—if they
are—have poor manufacturing yields. However, these are issues that tend to disappear
over time. Page | 4
Flexible displays: Like touch screens, flexible displays are another hot topic in the display
industry. They have been talked about for many years and are now being commercialized.
This year—2008— seems as if it will be the first year in which such displays will be
commercially available. The term flexible display could actually refer to two things; either
a display that is created on a flexible substrate for the purposes of facilitating R2R
processes, or one that is intrinsically flexible; that can actually be flexed or rolled/up by
the display’s ultimate owner. For the purposes of this report we are principally interested
in the latter. ITO‐coated plastic is routinely used in R2R processes and cracking is not a
major issue here. Where there is a potential problem does seem to arise in displays that
are actually being flexed constantly; this is the flexible display equivalent of the touch
screen display that is constantly being poked with a pen.
This type of issue has not mattered much in the past, since the “flexible display” or rollable
display was a fanciful idea. During 2008, Plastic Logic, Polymer Vision and perhaps other
firms, are planning to offer “rollable” displays. The demand for such displays is expected to
be motivated by mobile users who would like to carry around bigger displays than would
be permitted if the display used a rigid glass substrate. Most of the planned rollable
displays are still quite small. But the concept could be extended to larger displays; perhaps
first to presentation displays that could be easily carried by businesspeople on the move.
The ultimate would be a large roll‐up television display. This is actually envisioned as part
of the hardware necessary for next‐generation television and it would use a lot of
transparent conducting material, but all this lies a long way in the future.
Indeed, because the fairly futuristic aspect of flexible displays has meant that many firms
offering transparent conductors that are alternatives to ITO have not treated this
opportunity all that seriously. In fact, it was not even mentioned by a few such firms that
we interviewed for this study. One reason is that the opportunity at present is quite tiny.
More importantly, no one really knows if this is a concept that will take off commercially.
The opportunity in the touch‐screen business—which also calls for transparent conducting
materials with high physical resiliency—looks so much more attractive right now.
Lighting: EL lighting is a technology that has been around for a long time. It can easily be
created on flexible substrates with screen printing and frequently uses ITO as a conductor.
However, this kind of solid‐state lighting has a limited future. While widely used in
automobiles and for certain kinds of signage and architectural lighting, its performance—
especially with regard to brightness measures— more or less keeps it out of the huge
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general‐illumination market. In the past few years, the big hope for solid‐state lighting has
rested in the high‐brightness LED (HB‐LED) and the attention of researchers is now turning
to OLEDs, which also offer brightness, as well as printability and the ability to be fabricated
on a flexible substrate. Government funding for OLED lighting has been available in the
U.S., Europe and Japan and the area has attracted interest from a number of OLED makers
who have grown tired of waiting for AM OLED display market to take off. Page | 5
The unsuitability of ITO for this type of application, in part, is exactly the same story as
with flexible displays; ITO does not do that well on a flexible substrate. However, unlike in
the case of the rollable display, the idea with flexible lighting is not to constantly roll and
unroll them. So ITO may be a better bet here. Nonetheless, ITO is far from a perfect fit
with OLED lighting. Apart from purely technical issues, the idea of OLED lighting as an
environmentally friendly lighting technology does not entirely fit with ITO; a material that
is sourced from Chinese zinc mines.
In any case, some research work on OLED lighting is exploring other avenues, and the
European OLLA project has used PEDOT to create an “ITO‐less lamp.” As an organic
material itself, PEDOT seems especially suitable for taking up the opportunity to supply
novel electrode materials in the OLED lighting space. The firm most associated with this
activity has been H.C. Starck which has actively promoted this application for its PEDOT
material. Another firm with a potential role in this area is Agfa.
Printable electronics: In the past four or five years, there has been an increasing interest
in using printing equipment to create electronic devices and subsystems. While screen
printing has been used for many decades for certain processes in the electronics industry,
the new wave of interest in printing is aimed at creating much more sophisticated
systems. To date, printing has been used for all or part of the manufacturing process to
create displays, RFID tags, sensors, batteries, photovoltaic panels, etc.
In the proverbial perfect world, manufacturers sold on the idea of printable electronics
would like to be able to fabricate complete devices using printing. It seems that, as a
practical matter, for the foreseeable future, most “printed” electronics will involve
fabrication techniques other than printing at some layer of the device. Certainly, the
transparent conducting layer is one area where printing is not carried out to any great
extent at the present time, suggesting that there is an opportunity for creating transparent
conducting inks.
As it happens, ITO inks have been around for some time, but have generally
underperformed conventional ITO. This is also true of most of the other materials that can
or have been used as transparent conductive inks. These materials mainly consist of
PEDOT and nanotube inks, such as those developed by Eikos. While the performance of
these inks is not stellar, the focus on creating inks and dispersions is much greater in the
non‐ITO part of the transparent conductor market than in the ITO part. This is presumably
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because turning materials into inks is another way to distinguish the product in the
marketplace.
Thin‐film photovoltaics: From the perspective of firms marketing novel materials for use
as transparent conductors, both flexible displays and printed electronics are attractive in
that they are already businesses that have made a commitment to using new materials. Page | 6
For this reason, they are likely to be more open than the conventional FPD market, which
is conservative about replacing ITO. Much the same thing can be said about the thin‐film
PV market. In this market, a growing number of firms are producing solar panels based on
a select few photoactive materials, including amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride,
CIS/CIGS and a variety of organic materials. CIS/CIGS, in particular, has attracted particular
attention, since it has many of the virtues of thin film PV—lightweight, low cost, ability to
be created on a flexible substrate, etc.—while at the same time offering conversion
efficiencies that are not much lower than conventional (i.e., crystalline silicon) PV.
Thin‐film PV is fairly fluid at the present time in terms of cell and panel designs. However,
there seems to be a broad based need for transparent conductors for front contacts in the
application. TCOs other than ITO have been widely used for this application, although ITO
would certainly be applicable. TFPV is an area that some transparent conductor firms are
looking at seriously. This interest is being sparked by the apparently very high‐growth
potential of the area as a whole. But it is not seen as having the same potential as the
touch‐screen business. This may be because commodity TCOs seem to be adequate for
much of this market, which doesn’t seem to leave room for a value‐added/higher margin
material as is usually pitched towards the display industry by transparent conductor
makers. That said, an interesting little niche may be found for organic conductors in the
nascent organic‐PV space. PEDOT is already sold into this market for HIL (Hole Injection
Layer) applications.
For information on how to obtain a full copy of the NanoMarkets report, The Future of
ITO: Transparent Conductor and ITO Replacement Markets, please contact our offices at
(804) 270‐7010 or via email at sales@nanomarkets.net or by visiting our website at
www.nanomarkets.net.
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