In serving the applications for silver inks and pastes, manufacturers and distributors face a quandary:  most of the high-growth markets for silver are relatively small, while the larger markets are already mature and generally offer only modest growth prospects.  But the photovoltaics market for silver inks and pastes offers the best of both worlds.  This segment is already approaching a billion dollars in annual revenues, but it will grow faster—in absolute terms—than any of the other silver ink categories, and it will challenge traditional thick-film applications for dominance of the overall silver electronics market in the coming years.  

NanoMarkets' just-published analysis of the ITO alternatives market suggests that this market - much touted for several years - is ready to take off.  We have been following ITO alternatives for several years now and have generally been quite bullish on their long-term prospects.  In our latest report, however, we show that news from the alternative ITO "industry" is pointing towards accelerating commercialization.

There are concerns that the Smart Grid juggernaut may be slowing down.  This could be because the business cases for Smart Grid deployment in the distribution and customer premises are not as strong as advocates have presented them.  Perhaps more compelling stories can be found in deploying the latest transmission technology.  High-voltage DC transmission systems will reach almost $14.0 billion in annual revenues by 2015, for example.

Market analysis by NanoMarkets suggests that within a relatively few years, sales of silver inks into the Solid State Lighting (SSL) business, will grow to $250 million, offering an entirely new opportunity for the silver ink business.  The main market will be found in OLED lighting, which itself predicted to grow fast in the coming years.  In this application, silver ink and pastes can serve in electrodes, bus bars and even as a transparent conductor.

Although printed OLEDs have never quite achieved the success that some have projected for them, as this article shows, a surprisingly large number of the world’s biggest materials and chemical firms are betting on them.  The information for this article is drawn from NanoMarkets’ latest research report on OLED materials in which we forecast that sales of polymer OLED materials – the kind of OLED materials used in printed OLEDs – will reach $475 million in sales by 2017.

Carbon inks have been a mainstay of the thick film electronics business for as long as most people can remember.  The established carbon inks are used with silver inks, either to adjust conductivity levels or to reduce costs; carbon, obviously, is priced at a lot less than silver.  And in a period of deflation, especially when this is (paradoxically) combined with high silver prices, NanoMarkets sees a growing opportunity for standard carbon inks to replace silver inks wherever this is technically possible.

NanoMarkets believes that the market for OLED lighting will result in billions of dollars of revenues by the middle of this decade.  For now, however, the OLED light is a high-priced niche – or even novelty – item.  In this article – based on NanoMarkets’ latest research – we explain how we think that the OLED lighting market will get to be so big.

While revenues from the thin-film/printable battery market are negligible right now, NanoMarkets’ analysis believes they could reach over a $1.0 billion by 2015.  However, this encouraging forecast begs the question of how battery firms can best tap into this opportunity.  With this in mind, this article describes the strategies that thin-film/printable battery firms are and should adopt to penetrate their addressable markets.

According to NanoMarkets/Smart Grid Analysis, the Smart Grid supercapacitor market will reach $3.8 billion in 2015.  Today, however, the market for these systems is worth only about $0.4 billion with by far the biggest chunk of revenues coming from one specialized application, namely regenerative energy capture with load smoothing for light rail applications.  Our latest report on the topic, however, suggests that new applications , especially those related to power quality and grid instability applications , are likely to be driven significantly forward by the impressive gains that Smart Grid supercapacitors have been able to achieve.

NanoMarkets/Smart Grid Analysis believes that the deployment of Smart Grids throughout the world is going to generate major new opportunities for sensors in many roles and of many types.  One type of sensor opportunity in Smart Grid applications that show particular promise are dynamic line sensors which enable the grid to better adapt to changing weather and temperature conditions.  Another is the class of sensors used to facilitate online storage in the Smart Grid.  A third  is represented by Smart Voltage sensors that replace electromechanical voltage regulators by microelectronics technology and thereby manage voltage in the network significantly more effectively.   In our latest report on sensors in the Grid, we have analyzed these opportunities and how they are best capitalized on.