More details emerge on printed roll-to-roll memory

ThinFilm and its previous parent, Opticom ASA, have been working on the technology since 1994 looking at the electrical switching properties of polythiophenes.

The size of memory being made on the roll-to-roll line is 20-bits and it sits on a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) foil that runs roll-to-roll, according to Rolf Aberg, CEO of ThinFilm Electronics.

"The initial application is a toys & games application where the requirement is very low, in this case 20-bit. Going forward and driven by other applications we foresee requirements of 100-bit going to 1K-bit," he said in email correspondence.

The memory is passive matrix in a single layer, although ThinFilm demonstrated the possibility of multilayer memory arrays in collaborative research conducted with Intel.

For the 20-bit memory there is no "bypass" effect. For larger arrays ThinFilm has applied for a patent on a pulse control protocol and drive scheme designed to work around the bypass effect The bypass effect means the resistance between selected rows and columns depends on the status of all memory locations in an array unless a blocking device is used at each memory location to limit bypass currents.

Aberg declined to say how many circuits could be produced on the line in 1 minute or 1 hour.

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