The fabrication of roll-to-roll printed electronics allows the mass production of microelectronic products in a cost-efficient way. Soluble semiconducting materials, an adjustment of existing printing processes and an adapted chip design pave the way for new products, such as flexible and transparent conductive films and printed “radio frequency identification” (RFID) tags.A high resolution roll-to-roll production process was developed to achieve very small structure sizes down to 10μm on large areas with production speeds exceeding 30m/min. Two applications of printed electronics are presented: Transparent conductive films were realized by producing finely structured thin metal tracks on flexible substrates. Printed Manchester-encoded circuits and 13.56MHz RFID transponders were fabricated, which are based on the p-type semiconductor poly-(3-hexylthiophene).
Dietmar Zipperer, "Roll-To-Roll Printed Electronics" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP26), 2010, pp 734 - 736, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2010.26.1.art00093_2