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.

"It's like making waffles using a waffle iron!" pipped Dr Low Hong Yee, the research scientist overseeing nanoimprint programme at IMRE. Nanoimprint lithography (NIL) is a simple low cost high resolution technique used in making nanostructure patterns, which form the basis of electronic circuitry, advanced photonics and fluidic devices. Developments in applications to maximize the light extraction on light emitting diodes (LEDs), improvement of anti-reflective lens, as well as the push towards one terabit on patterned media, have created much buzz in Japan. The key advantage of NIL lies in its potential as a less expensive fabrication tool for nanostructure patterning compared to current optical techniques" explained Dr Low. Following the fact finding trip to Japan by the NIL team from ETPL, IMRE and SIMTech, the NIL flagship project was approved by ETPL EXCO today.