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22 The PCB Magazine • August 2014 PRINTED ELECTRONICS 2014: WORLD STANDARDIzATION EFFORT continues Other current collaborative activities in progress include: • FlexTech Alliance: – Planning stages of summit on Global PE Standards priorities • OE-A: – Exploring alliance options; joint PE-Roadmap discussion • IEC TC119-Participant/member. – "D" Liaison status to materials group for IPC pending – "Normative reference" status is goal for already-published IPC/JPCA standards – Working model: Use IPC lead and faster pace to guide content of international, and IEC global and governmental status to maintain global coordination – ASTM-D-65 test methods – Co-meeting with ASTM F01.18 at APEX2014; close contact maintenance As a side note, the spirit of collaboration and cooperation in this growing industry is not limited to IPC. The IEC TC119 committee was in the early stages of developing requirements for barrier layer materials, a critical element of many printed electronics applications. They discovered that the IEEE was working on simi- lar requirements and IEC TC119 has thrown its support behind the IEEE effort. With all the positive collaborative efforts un- derway, there are still challenges to overcome. Global PE Standardization: Challenges Ahead As noted earlier in this article, throughout (roughly) the first decade of this century, there were promoters of the printed electronics con- cept whose excitement at the possibilities led to underestimating the effort and time required to achieve success, and overestimating the growth in applications and profits. There were well- known corporations who invested heavily and lost heavily based on those predictions. Living down those excesses of the past, and demon- strating value in rational, appropriate applica- tions of this technology is an ongoing commu- nication and education effort of the IPC Printed Electronics Initiative to encourage further pru- dent resourcing of printed electronics develop- ment. Another potential challenge is actually a side-effect of the breadth of possible applica- tions of the loosely-defined printed electronics technology. Building on national and regional strengths leads naturally to a degree of segmen- tation of printed electronics technology appli- cation types by region. Examples include (and these are oversimplified): • North America=Medical • Germany=Auto • Korea=Display and portable • Japan=Hybridized conventional/PE combo/components The risk, of course, is that this regional spe- cialization will lead to not-quite-parallel region- al or national development of standards par- ticular to each end application, which doesn't match the versatility of the underlying technol- ogy. There is a political element to this chal- lenge in cases where a national government, for reasons of industrial policy, may seek to domi- nate a particular aspect of a technology and en- courage this regional compartmentalization. If unchecked, this leads to (and we know this from similar experiences in conventional electronics) a deferred burden of time and duplication of ef- fort as the globalization of the industry drives de-confliction of these documents. It is better to coordinate from the beginning. The final challenge we'll discuss (though many more exist, it is beyond our scope here) is in the natural and healthy desire of the initial innovators in this (or any other new) technol- ogy to preserve their lead market position by keeping as much of the technology and meth- ods development as proprietary. There is always a balance to be maintained between protecting the market advantage hard-won technology de- velopments can bring (maintaining or growing the size of your slice of the pie) and the market advantage that growing the industry can bring (baking a bigger pie). The trick lies in sharing enough developed technology so that the mar- ket (and your customer awareness, supplier breadth of offerings) grows to your advantage,