Lightning Labels Blog

Xerox recently announced a breakthrough that could have wide ranging implications for a number of industries. The researchers at Xerox have invented a new ink that can be printed on paper or plastic like normal inks, but this silver ink has a special property - it can conduct electricity. This is a huge development for the new field of printed electronics.

In the future, many electrical components such as simple screens, sensors, solar cells, and radio antennae will not be manufactured by traditional fabrication plants, they will be printed. What this means for the label industry is that a product label may have a regular printed component as well as some kind of electrical device built into the label itself. This electrical device could replace the barcode for identification, or it could be something much more sophisticated such as a video screen.

We are not there yet, but when this technology becomes mainstream it will transform many industries. I predict we will start to see some of this become mainstream in the next three to five years. We have already seen some interesting developments that I have written about recently that gives an idea of what we can expect.

Related Articles

PrintedElectronicsNow.com - New Silver Ink Developed by Xerox

Digital Beat - Xerox develops silver ink for wearable or throwaway electronics

This entry was posted November 17th, 2009 by Peter Renton and is filed under Future Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.