Research Articles

This article summaries some of the technology and market analysis from the IDTechEx research report "Metal Oxide TFT Backplanes for Displays 2013-2018: Analysis, Trends, Forecasts".

Tablet and smart phone sales reached 116 million and 675 million units in 2012, exhibiting a year-to-year growth of 43 and 94%, respectively. In contrast, desktop sales have declined. The market message is clear: consumers are demanding fully portable devices. This translates into a large and growing market opportunity for energy storage devices.

Readers may have noticed over the past day or two an epidemic of web-articles concerning a soon-to-be-published paper authored by the Institute of Technology in Chicago and the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Lyon relating to emissions from desktop 3D printers.

In this article we will briefly look at implementations in the rail transit sector, and the kind of technologies that are making their way onto trains, railways and waysides in order to reduce power consumption, maintenance costs and reliability of train services.

Printed Electronics USA, the American event forming part of the global IDTechEx event series on the topic, has neared sell-out for exhibition space four months prior to the event.

Stretchable electronics has been one of the least exploited but most researched sectors of the new electronics over the past decade. To find out more read the IDTechEx research report "Stretchable Electronics Comes to Market".

The market for electric taxis will be a huge 345,000 vehicles in 2017, surpassing $10 billion in business as early as 2019 as forecasted by new IDTechEx research in its recently published report, Hybrid and Electric Buses and Taxis 2013-2023: Forecasts, Opportunities, Players.

Some of the highlights at this year's Printed Electronics event, organized by IDTechEx in Tokyo, Japan, are discussed in this article, focusing on the keynotes on the first day of the conference, which was attended by approximately 250 people.

IDTechEx projects that 119,000 electric taxis will be sold giving a $1.8 billion global market. Most of the commercial electric vehicles, including the taxis, are and will be pure electric. That will even be true of large commercial vehicles, notably e-buses, set to exceed a $20 billion market as early as 2018 and dominated by demand in China.