ITO Alternatives:  Market Progress and a Thought Experiment

Published: July 01, 2010    Category: Advanced Materials Electronics and Devices

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.

In terms of "hard cash" we see revenues from ITO alternatives growing from about $140 million in 2010 to $1.1 billion in 2015 and then going on to reach almost $2.0 billion in 2017.  And while almost all of the 2010 number will come from low-margin/commodity transparent conducting oxides, much of the future opportunity will come from more exotic - and certainly more profitable - nanomaterials; especially carbon nanotube films and nanosilver films.

The PV industry has already shifted its interest from ITO to other TCOs on cost - and cost stability -- grounds.  But, while alternative TCOs inevitably have cost advantages over ITO, they are usually far less transparent and conductive.  We continue to believe that nanomaterials-especially nanosilver inks and carbon nanotube coatings-represent the only materials category where there is a significant likelihood of achieving materials that outperform ITO in terms of both transparency and conductivity while also reducing costs.  Such materials either realistically promise very low materials costs (carbon nanotubes) or low-cost processing (nanosilver inks) or both.  Other advantages that these alternatives may offer are cost stability (nanotubes again) and flexibility (good for touch-screen and flexible displays).

Research and development in these areas has been ongoing for years and this has often seemed to involve mostly fairly obscure companies.  However, dig down a little further and you find that there is considerable interest from larger firms too.  Ascent, a major player in the CIGS PV space, is working with Cambrios to develop nanosilver materials as the transparent electrode for its PV cells.  Meanwhile, Sumitomo has a tripartite relationship with Chisso and Cambrios to sell a similar material into the LCD industry.  Sumitomo, through its CDT subsidiary, has also announced the use of a copper formulation to replace ITO in OLED lighting.

And on the nanotube front, LG Display has a recently negotiated a joint development agreement with Unidym, which is also working with Samsung on nanotube transparent electrode film for e-paper displays.  Then there is Novaled and Saint-Gobain Recherche, which announced as long as two years ago that they had developed a transparent electrode material for OLEDs with up to ten times the surface conductivity of ITO.  

We believe that with the involvement of such companies, there is a very good chance that ITO alternatives will quickly reach a level of technological maturity that enables them to be a serious competitor to ITO in a number of important applications.

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