PragmatIC: welcome to the world of electronic flexible stickers
Cambridge firm scales up to produce billions of an ultra-thin equivalent of the silicon chip, smart labelling for 'the internet of things'.
Pragmatic Printing CEO Scott White with an example of a flexible integrated circuit.
Pioneering flexible electronics company has unveiled ground-breaking technology that heralds mass production of the printed equivalent of a silicon chip, an ultra-thin electronic sticker that will help make the 바카라 사이트˜internet of things바카라 사이트™ a reality.
The Cambridge firm, founded in December 2010, has received £2.5 million from Innovate UK for a range of funded projects to create these flexible integrated circuits.
Thinner than a human hair, they can be easily embedded in any surface on a wide range of everyday items.
An Innovate UK award of £250,000 in 2014 helped Pragmatic develop a prototype for this ultra-thin film version of its technology.
PragmatIC바카라 사이트™s growing customer base now includes multi-national companies across a number of sectors, including consumer goods, packaging, security printing and mainstream electronics. Employee numbers have more than doubled in the last year.
High-volume manufacturing
Pragmatic is planning to produce billions of circuits from one production line.
The firm바카라 사이트™s latest innovation, FlexLogIC, transfers the production process into a self-contained, fully automated, modular system for high-volume manufacturing.
It is being developed with funding from the EU Horizon 2020 programme and exposes the market to connectivity and computing power at a cost that is 100 or even 1,000 times cheaper than the silicon chip.
PragmatIC, headed by a serial entrepreneur in CEO Scott White, has a pilot-scale manufacturing line at the National Centre for Printable Electronics within the (CPI) at Sedgefield, part of Innovate UK바카라 사이트™s Catapult network.
FlexLogIC 바카라 사이트“ a 바카라 사이트˜factory in a box바카라 사이트™ that can be dropped into a customer바카라 사이트™s manufacturing process 바카라 사이트“ is a real game-changer and the key to commercial scale-up, according to Richard Price, the company바카라 사이트™s chief technology officer:
The 바카라 사이트˜intelligence everywhere바카라 사이트™ vision requires a step-change in the cost and the capacity of electronics manufacturing. It needs to be flexible and able to be introduced seamlessly into everyday labels but scaled to the eventual trillions of units at the right cost point.
We바카라 사이트™ve been working with CPI over the last 4 years to develop our first-generation technology, and we have further developments and improvements behind that which will continue.
The next phase is to develop that production line capability, which will scale to billions of circuits a year from one production line.
Production line capability
Richard was one of the founders of the company in 2010. By 2014 there were a dozen employees but there are now over 30 and that number is expected to grow by some 30% a year.
We바카라 사이트™ve benefited from most of the funded project options available through Innovate UK, including 2 Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. There바카라 사이트™s been a lot of support from Innovate UK for what we바카라 사이트™re doing.
PragmatIC바카라 사이트™s potential was further underlined in December 2014 when it completed a £5.4 million equity funding round led by with support from and existing shareholders.
The internet of things
PragmatIC is a partner in PING (Printed Intelligent NFC Game cards and Packaging) a consortium of world-leading companies backed by Horizon 2020 and looking to bring flexible electronics from the laboratory into mainstream markets. .
Logistics was always a likely market for intelligent labelling but customers are now inquiring about packaging that can monitor temperature or humidity on, say, a lorry in Africa carrying melons or flowers, adds Richard.
That smart packaging area is what will open up the internet of things.