With printed electronics (PE) moving out of the laboratory and into the ramp-up phase, manufacturing capacity will need to significantly increase for the technology's commercial potential to be fully realized, says a new report from Glen Allen, VA-based NanoMarkets (www.nano markets.net).

That expansion is currently underway which, based on the firm's analysis, will boost the industry's manufacturing capacity from negligible amounts today to around 400 million sq meters by the end of 2013—sufficient to produce almost $40 billion in printed-electronics products.

Key findings from the report include:

* PE-manufacturing infrastructure is beginning to ramp up as several companies have announced new plants coming online or investments in companies building production capacity.

* NanoMarkets expects printing to make major inroads into applications that now use vacuum deposition and photolithography. This will be especially noticeable in the OLED display and RFID sectors.

* As demand for PE grows, there will be a switch to high-volume traditional printing methods such as flexography, offset and gravure. By 2013, as much as 70 percent of capacity will be accounted for by these traditional processes, compared to around 50 percent today.

* Even though the PE industry is moving towards full-scale production, there will be a rapidly growing need for smaller R&D machines in addition to the big presses. By 2013, these machines—predominantly inkjet—will ship at an annual rate of around 4,500/yr compared to a few hundred now. Buyers will include research institutes and the growing number of educational establishments that include printable-electronics courses in their curriculum.