Printed Electronics are Ubiquitous

The printed electronics market has seen exponential growth. By now, it has ballooned to over $300 billion globally - even overtaking the silicon integrated circuit industry.

This technology began with a small number of niche, high-end products. It expanded rapidly in the 2010s, thanks to plummeting costs and improved production methods. By the 2020s it had exploded into the mainstream – creating a whole new generation of ultra-thin electronics.

Today, these have such low fabrication costs that they are ubiquitous, being present in countless everyday business and consumer applications. Many previously bulky and heavy devices can now be folded, stored or carried as easily as sheets of paper. This includes flexible TV displays that can be rolled or hung like posters, wearable mobile phones, electronic newspapers with moving pictures, disposable netbooks, "smart" packaging and labels with animated text, signage in retail outlets that can be updated shop-wide at the touch of a button.

Multimedia players with expandable, fold-out touchscreens are especially popular. Even low-end models are now the size and weight of credit cards and can easily fit inside a wallet. With petabytes of storage, gigapixels of screen resolution and superfast transfer speeds, they are millions of times more powerful than iPods of previous decades. They are also completely wireless - no cables or physical connections of any kind are required, and music can be enjoyed using wireless earphones.