 We're here at GSI Technologies. So who are you? I'm Rick Menzel. I'm director of technical and customer service been with the company since 2003 and I've got personally over 30 years experience in the polymer thick film printing industry Polymer thick film thick film is an additive printing technology where we can add Conductive materials to flexible surfaces using printing techniques and in our case we're pretty well focused on screen printing Which is some people sounds kind of antiquated But the way we manage it and the level at which we print is very sophisticated where we've really taken the art out of it And made it more of a science. So you said how long experience personally since I got into business 1980 So it has been printed electronics going on for a while. Yeah, it wasn't called that back then But we we didn't realize we had an industry that we were starting back then But I got into the business by printing electro luminescent lamps. There's actually an example in the case down here The exit sign that's flashing that's something people are very familiar with and That would have been a technology where I really started my my career path is I mean all the exit lamps are like this No, but a lot of them are a lot of them are using what it's not a light bulb That's your light bulbs and LED is a very popular technology The the people's interest in that is its power is lower than even an LED lighting system So they get get power savings is the real driver behind that and the uniformity how perfect the letters are formed How many are using your technology? There's only a couple companies in the world that are actually trying to market that We're we're producing the lamps for them and they're they have to market the finished exit sign What does it mean lower power consumption lower wattage lower lower wattage off the mains power So it's its cost savings for the owner less power less price for make it Maybe in the future less price to operate and and lower maintenance cost They last fairly long so you get a reduced maintenance over conventional lighting sources Is it possible to make it cheaper than conventional ones? It's really not a price play as much as it is a an operating cost of ownership is really where the where the cost advantage comes That's that's actually a very small part of our business today a real focus of our business or things like electrodes for glucose test strips Where you're producing the functional layers inside a glucose for type people with diabetes who have to test their blood sugar This is the conductive pathway and then our customer would apply their proprietary chemistry Which would be an enzyme of sorts to test points That are along the strip here And then they would be assembled into individual strips that would go into a meter because a handheld meter that would give you a Glucose reading number very common You know there's there's there's tens of millions of diabetics in the world that rely on these type of technology So you print them. Yes. All everything we do is is Additive printing technology. So you do the printers. Yes, and and so you are already printing millions billions billions billions Billions we produce over a billion and a half of those a year just of these. Yes. That's one of many products. We do and so So the printer electronics business is is already big But it's gonna be much bigger much bigger and we're we're we're in a what some consider a low-tech area of it But it's the foundation business that everything needs to be interconnected in this business whether you're looking at organic Electronics or whatever somehow you got to get the power and in and out of it out of a device And that today still relies on these type of additive circuits that are silver filled silver silver chloride carbon materials platinum materials The real point for us is we're a we're a contract manufacturers building to our customers design We don't do design work We assist people in scale-up and mass production of their of their product or at least a component of their product So you say low-tech people consider you to be in the low-tech Because it's not the resolution is not that high we can't have much things going on The resolution and when people think screen printing they think making t-shirts Printing printing t-shirts things like that that they just don't recognize the technology that you can bring to the printing of You know using screen printing and and the controls and the and the the Specifications and tolerances that we can meet when we approach it as a manufacturing Technology not just as printing. So here's some examples. It says Kind of stuff that these are the typical Devices were manufacturing people that range from glucose test strips to the multi-analyte sensors these others Those are those are those are words. It'll mean something to people in the art a lot of it We can't talk about because our customers unfortunately don't like us showing the products we make for them Okay, a lot of these are large large multi-national companies, but we're testing we have products that test for cholesterol level glucose level Devices that can indicate indicate whether or not you've had a heart attack We have customers that are doing particle counting and what they call cell viability determinations where it's able to size particles inside a fluid and also tell you whether those those Particles or cells are alive or dead So, you know, we're in it when a range of technology areas It's really an exciting business that way because every day we're working on something different to take you to the other extreme In the bottom of the case. This is an automotive seat heater Doesn't look like much there, but that black and silver device there gets incorporated into an automotive seat And when you press the button it warms your your rear end up instantly not instantly But over time and what's really unique with this technology is itself limiting that no thermostats required So it's extremely safe and has reduced parts counting the vehicle. So our products today are used in many General Motors vehicles Cadillac vehicles pick up trucks SUVs that we're making the seat heater component for those vehicles in light And it's a lightweight product as well Is this reliable for like actually one of the reasons they chose to use this technology was its reliability And to reduce warranty in seat heaters its seat heaters suffer inherently from warranty problems because of the metal wire That's used to heat the seat up and this technology is extremely flexible and Distributes the power over a larger area and it and its designs in such a way that it cannot short together If it does fail it'll fail open. So all you'll end up with is no heat not with a fire in your car Can you show this what is this is was actually one of the giveaways in the in the bag? Everybody received when they came into the show It's a printed resistor network on one side and on the other side There's there's thermochromic inks and then some decorative ink that that that puts the text on there And what it is it's a device to test the life of a battery if you watch this cell will start to color You'll see the color shift where it's going yellow And this is a dead battery this battery is almost almost Useless you can see the other two cells don't change color which would indicate okay or good only the replace cell is on and it's Reusable as you cool it down It reverts back so it's a totally reusable device and it's unique and that it can also test One and a half volt batteries as well you can see the Now this battery is almost okay. You can see that middle one is just starting to change color It's not a quick test, but you know when you grab batteries everybody's got a drawer full of batteries You don't know the good battery from the bad batteries. This is a kind of a handy device for around your home All right, so you were talking a lot about medical but and also in the cars. Where's it going to be? Well, the next you know the next frontier And this show is definitely been talking about it a lot is flexible wearable technology This is a unique situation for most of our most of our products are made on very rigid films this film is elastic and Stretchable and these conductors could be elongated and stretched and still maintain their conductivity So you start looking at things such as I'm going to pick this up and show you know a heart monitor Or you may be sensing perspiration or whatever and they need to build these devices in the clothing And they need to be comfortable. They need to conform to the body both substrates like this Which is what we're usually working on a very rigid and stiff This is breakthrough technology. We're now working with what they call TPU films thermal plastic Elastomers and then a match set of conductive inks that provide the The durability required we haven't proven it yet, but there's there's talk that this will even be launderable It'll survive several machine washing. Yeah, and it's a good for the environment These are pretty much safe materials. I mean, these are these are very stable materials There is is silver in these products and in some countries do have concerns with disposal of silver But that varies by country. It's tough to make a general statement on that Because the back side and then you've got the front side here and what's unique That you could take something like this and fold it up And reopen it and you still have a functional product Fully functional. Yeah, it doesn't lose any no and so this is breakthrough and how soon it's a coming thing It's it's probably you know between running more tests and and and completing in all the validation work I would say you'll start to see some products that are featuring these materials in the next six months to a year Plus we need people integrating You know commercial products maybe as you'll see as you talked others in this whole industry The challenge the whole industry has is is the pull of the market and and getting the application started And I think there's enough of those especially in this area There's enough of the large companies the Nike's and the adidas and others in the world that have applications that That are just waiting for products like this to be developed or capabilities like this to be developed to realize some of the things They've been working on over the years So What's what's possible with printed electronics? How complex can it be in a like in a shirt it can it can the shirt like check your emails and beep Oh, what's what's quite there? There are companies here that are working on on Thin film transistors and other organic technologies that start to approach those kind of areas But we really see the next five to ten years is really emerging of the silicon existing silicon technologies Interfacing with substrates and capabilities like this to realize products sooner. So it's like sensors, right? Sensors and then there would be somewhere to connect it with Bluetooth 4 or something sensing there And then there's also energy harvesting technologies that Companies are developing chip technology that can harvest energy off your cell phone off an NFC Output of your phone is enough power to run the sensor So you won't need to wear a battery when you want to probe your your sensor does that work? Yes That's there's there's chip technology out there now that is waiting for this part To become real so they can apply it in the field and so you just put your phone towards the close And then the old information comes it'll probe it activate and get the information off of that And then it'll have a small storage device on it that provides enough stored power to run the the analytics while you're running Exercising relaxing whatever it might be Sounds really cool. So what do you think about this conference? We might be this is our 50 year exhibiting and we've been members since the inception of the ID tech X and as you know, you know where we open the discussion at we've been doing this In a less organized fashion for a long time as a as a As a freestanding company and then we've seen this industry grow around us every year it gets bigger Every year the quality of people that we meet here improve in terms of their interest and Understanding of what we and the others here do and then we're also seeing you know much more in the application development area It's getting more exciting each year because you start talking about real products. They're going to make it to market And that's really what we're all about We're we're very close to the end of the value chain where we're we're next to the end of delivering a functional product to an actual consumer We're in the unique position of being at you know at the at the revenue end of the pipe so to speak So the the consumer will notice a big change when everything is printed electronics I think they'll start to see just more things are going to pick up the intelligence being able they They won't be cumbersome, you know, you won't need to be wearing a battery pack to have something work It'll all be integrated into the into the Device itself, you know, there's going to be less wires. It won't be You know cumbersome interconnects and things like that that some of these devices have today And there's going to be more sensing in the world's you know the data they want to gather today They want to sense more and more activities that we're doing that your car is doing that your bicycle is doing and and try to manage that data So you supposedly improve your life. I can't promise that You know, but that's that's I think some of the the altruistic goals that some of these companies have with these ideas And of course in medical they're looking at at regular real-time monitoring of your health And it's sharing that data with your with your healthcare provider on a real-time basis rather than once a year when you get Your physical he'll have enough data to say, you know, you don't look too bad today But two weeks ago you were your heart was really not working well So there's those kind of things that could come out of this So some of the things you said are real and you're shipping billions some of these things are coming much The future you look at the car seat heaters the glucose test strips the the particle counting technology cholesterol checking technology Blood coagulation testing technology all those are real products. We ship today every day of the week billions of them Some of them by the billions some of them by the billion and the other stuff is coming How can he come sooner than some people expect or is it coming coming later? So so many of these things require a bigger cooperation of Multi levels of a supply chain to make them happen and and also the cost is always a factor with any any consumer product There's always that last point of it needs to be cheaper such as everybody wants to make smart packaging But your challenge there is you know a box that goes around a bag of cereal is worth about 17 cents And if you want to make an intelligence that could end up costing a dollar 17 or two dollars and 17 cents Can they find a value in that for the consumer that's going to pay for that? Intelligence and so you can't just do it for the sake of doing it There has to be some benefit and some value proposition for the end user Reusing recycling or make something that has a value beyond the initial lifetime of the product You know that it first serves another purpose after you use it or you know things like that Or where some of the the early-stage things will happen where it doesn't become a one-time use that it's got a continued value But that's you know those are easy things to talk about very hard to realize