GLEN ALLEN, VA – The market for organic electronics materials will be worth $4.9 billion in 2012, surging to $15.8 billion in 2015, according to analyst NanoMarkets.

By 2015, NanoMarkets estimates 80% of organic electronics materials will be sold into three applications: RFID, display backplanes and OLED lighting and displays. By then, RFID will be the largest application accounting for $6.9 billion in materials sales, with today's dominant application, OLEDs, accounting for $5.6 billion, according to the firm. NanoMarkets expects RFID to overtake OLEDs as the largest consumer of organic electronics materials by 2012.

NanoMarkets says today's organic semiconductor materials are inadequate. Besides limits on performance, many are available only in small quantities. The company believes new kinds of organic semiconductor materials such as rubrene and hybrid materials, including formulations with carbon nanotubes, will spur the market to $4.9 billion in revenues by 2015.

To be successful, organic electronics will have to emulate the traditional semiconductor industry and invent an organic version of CMOS with its own stable materials sets. To make this happen, materials companies must offer commercial quantities of n-type semiconductors and organic dielectrics, says NanoMarkets.

The substrate business will grow to $6.9 billion in sales by 2015, with a majority the flexible type and specially prepared for organic electronics through novel forms of barrier coatings and reduced surface roughness.

As organic electronics devices ship in quantity, material suppliers will have to adjust formulations for offerings to work in large-scale manufacturing plants. These plants now seem more likely to use versions of traditional evaporation, coating and flexo printing, rather than ink-jet approaches. Suppliers will have to meet the specialized requirements for viscosity, volatility and other characteristics that the industry will require, says the researcher.