Hosted by Alix Paultre, the Tinker’s Toolbox is the Advantage Design Group’s web-based interview show where we talk about the latest technology, components, and design issues for the electronic design engineering community.
In this podcast we talk to Jennifer Ernst, the VP of North America for Thin Film Electronics about the state of printed electronics today. The company is a leading provider of non-volatile memory products based on the use of functional polymer materials ideally suited for consumer products and application areas such as brand protection, authenticity identification, smart packaging, displays, and all-printed RFID tags.
Here is a link to the podcast in case the playbacvk button isn’t working: Thin Film Podcast
Here is a recent release from the company on their technology:
Thin Film Electronics (“Thinfilm”) today announced that a new Arduino-powered development kit is now available online through Inventables – “the innovator’s hardware store.” Leveraging the Arduino open-source electronics prototyping platform, Thinfilm’s market-leading memory technology will now be available to Inventables’ expansive community of inventors for innovation across a wide range of industries.
“The Thinfilm Toy Development Kit, which was introduced a year ago, has been very well received among toy companies currently prototyping with Thinfilm Memory,” said Davor Sutija, Thinfilm’s CEO. “With significant traction in games and toys and growing interest from other industries, we want to make Thinfilm’s memory technology more broadly accessible. By utilizing Arduino and distributing the development kit through Inventables, we move another step closer to our vision of Memory Everywhere.”
Thinfilm is a leading provider of roll-to-roll printed, rewritable non-volatile memory products. These flexible memories are ideally suited for consumer products such as personalized toys and online-enabled game cards. In current applications, this technology makes cards and toys ‘intelligent’ by storing user and game flow information including the evolution of characters and skill levels. Other applications for Thinfilm Memory include brand protection, authenticity identification and smart packaging.
The enhanced Thinfilm Development Kit provides all of the tools needed to design with Thinfilm Memory, including samples of Thinfilm 20-bit memory stickers and memory-enhanced cards, a memory read/write device containing the Thinfilm Memory Controller, access to Thinfilm’s Arduino programmer and documentation through SourceForge, and concept cards to inspire inventors across a range of applications.
The Thinfilm kit supports Arduino – an open-source computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board and a development environment for writing software for the board – which simplifies and accelerates concept development using Thinfilm Memory.
Inventables, well known for its unique online presentation of products and development ideas, supplies product developers, researchers, artists and inventors with inspiration and small quantities of materials needed to build prototypes and test concepts.
For more information on the new Arduino-powered development kit, visit: https://www.inventables.com/technologies/printed-rewritable-memory-development-kit.