To be held in Tokyo, Japan on 8-9 Oct 2008, Dr Mark Auch will present "Breakthrough in flexible, transparent encapsulation" in the Material Advances track. A line-up of the speakers can be found here.

A press release on IMRE's flexible barrier substrate was announced today where KISCO (Asia), a subsidiary of the Japanese parent company KISCO Ltd., will commercialise and market the barrier films in the Asia Pacific region. G24i was also present for their interest of the substrates for their Dye Sensitized Solar Cells.

The breakthrough in these plastic barrier substrates were tested and validate by the Centre for Process Innovation, UK. The moisture barrier performance of better than 10-6g/m²/day, or one millionth of a gram per square meter per day, which surpasses the requirements for flexible organic device substrates is proven. The barrier film also has a lag time of more than 2300 hours at 60°C and 90% RH (i.e. the time required for moisture to pass through the barrier film under those conditions).

[Press Release] [Photos]

We were there!

Digital Life by The Straits Times covered our deployment of the RFID Smart Shelf deployment in the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library. Thumbs up for Eddie Tan and his team from I2R for making this a successful showcase. The Smart Shelf system is a platform technology for other applications such as the legal offices (with tons of files), warehousing, luxury retail goods such as jewellery and timepieces and pharmaceutical products. Read about the benefits it brought to the library here. Contact us if you have an application in mind!

[Press Release]

Delegates from the RFID World Asia 2008 visited the latest deployment of Smart Shelf by I2R at our new National Library building. The visit showcase the innovative use of RFID in the National Libraries for self-check out/in of books, and locating of (misplaced) books in real-time.

Mr Boon gave a keynote country update titled "The Singapore RFID strategy: Bridging R&D into developments and applications" at the RFID World Asia 2008 (9 ~ 11 April) conference. Dr Lee Eng Wah (Director of the National RFID Centre) and Mr Walter Lee (SVP, ETPL) also sat in the Pan-Asia panel discussion on "Can Asia innovate itself into global leadership". The National RFID Centre also exhibited a booth to showcase A*STAR's portfolio of technologies in RFID.

[Photos]

Moving into its 2nd year, the National RFID Centre received her new tranche of $2.3m funding to run the operation till 2011.

Two new Flagship Projects were approved from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering on Printed Electronics and OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) with a total budget of S$3.3 million. Printed Electronics is an emerging technology which promises extremely low cost, potentially flexible and disposable electronics, the market for which is expected to grow to US$300 billion by Year 2027. Under the Flagship Projects, the team will develop new semiconducting materials for printable TFTs and Photovoltaics. The team will also demonstrate the full feature of its blue emitting material which has attracted interests from polymer-OLED industry as it has good color coordinate for polymer-OLED TV application. The market for OLED display is expected to grow to US$6.6 billion by 2012.

2 milestones in 2 weeks!! Good things certainly comes in pairs. Last week was the Singapore Airshow and today a MOU was signed between MediaCart Asia and Cold Storage to deploy the intelligent shopping carts in the Fusionopolis (A*STAR's new home). IME's UHF RFID chip will be used to bring the cost down in the manufacturing of these carts. More in the press release and photos.

Last week was certainly a busy week for us, here are some pictures of the successful deployment @ The Singapore Airshow. An efficient and non-intrusive collection of 40,000 delegates and exhibitors statistics. These important statistics were captured for business intelligence that the show organisers can use for their next event. If these photos do not excite you, adrenaline photos of the aerial display can be found here.

The UHF RFID reader modules that ware deployed were almost a namecard size, and having an IC chip solution has certainly saved the show organiser hundreds of thousands dollars for hardware costs!