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18 The PCB Magazine • August 2014 PRINTED ELECTRONICS 2014: WORLD STANDARDIzATION EFFORT continues • Each success was developed in isolation and any parallel efforts elsewhere must there- fore be uniquely re-developed • Technical solutions to any problems en- countered were similarly re-developed for each case All of these made for an inefficient repeti- tion of effort for each project. In addition, there was no general agreement on definitions, ex- pectations, etc. 2010 Issues Impeding Market Development We identified a number of impediments to a fully functional global printed electronics mar- ketplace, including (but not limited to): 1. Additional research and development to refine, expand, and fully characterize ex- isting successful material and process sets was needed. 2. Basic research to identify new materials and processes to address cost, reliability, envi- ronmental, health, and safety issues associated with some of the existing material and pro- cesses was distributed (piecemeal) among many centers around the world. 3. Process developments were needed, par- ticularly linkage of existing unit operations into integrated production sequences, as much of the equipment available had been developed and optimized to perform one kind of process step only. 4. Market projections (both in size and di- rection) tended to be highly speculative, in part because the concept of a "printed electronics product" was poorly defined, with very indis- tinct boundaries. 5. No world-wide system existed whereby a potential buyer could describe to multiple po- tential suppliers what was desired in terms of a printed electronic product in a consistently understood manner in either performance, reli- ability, acceptance requirements, etc. 6. While there were multiple venues where technological developments, basic research, market potential were discussed, there were too few forums where existing success stories (and the failures along the way) were presented to other would-be practitioners of the art as "les- sons learned" opportunities. 7. Printed electronics incorporates elements of both traditional electronics manufacture and traditional printing technologies. Even skilled designers in one of the traditional fields might be unaware of design considerations critical to success in the other. The first three of these impediments were and are beyond IPC's scope. The fourth might be achievable by IPC, but was deemed less effi- cient than development of a partnership to ad- dress the issues by expanding the scope of an existing platform. The final three we judged as well within our established abilities. With those caveats, we concluded that sufficient maturity in the individual elements necessary had been achieved to allow the development of a true global industry, with cooperative support from IPC and many others. Our working assumption was that in order to achieve the desired state of the industry, it was necessary to reduce or eliminate the wasted effort in repeated "re-inventions of the wheel." In part, mutually understandable means of com- municating methods, needs and requirements were necessary. IPC has been in the business of facilitating global, consensus-based standards, test methods, and guidelines in the traditional electronics industries for more than 50 years. That body of work serves as the means of com- munication described earlier for the traditional electronics industry, so it should be possible to build the equivalent communications tool for printed electronics, with the right participants. The same could be said of the design require- ments. IPC has a long history of providing tech- nology forums for lessons learned in the tra- ditional electronics manufacturing arena and has well established methods to support such events. What was lacking (at least at the time) was sufficient specific technical background to insure that any such event would be truly useful to attendees. This was another oppor- tunity to couple our resources with those of other organizations with the specific knowl- edge to support the growth of this industry for the benefit of our existing and future mem-