OE-A, the Organic and Printed Electronics Association, a working group within VDMA, hosts an annual competition that looks for new ideas, prototypes and designs related to flexible, organic and printed electronics.

Fraunhofer ISC & partner has won this year in the category "Best Publicly Funded Project Demonstrator" with its anti counterfeit label developed within the framework of the SUPERSMART project with partners Coatema, CEA Liten, Joanneum Research, University of Bordeaux and VTT.

A shock detection active tag based on a piezo material to track product damage during transport and an anti-counterfeiting label relying on an electrochromic display to authenticate medical or luxury products.

"The remarkable aspect is the use of up scaled materials and processes bridging the gap between academic research and commercial application achieving high TRL level as well as recyclability assessment of final products enabled by paper PCB paradigm," was the jury's verdict.

The target group for this entry was the packaging and label market, and more generally the growing field of the Internet of Things and contains a range printed electronics components, including printed conductive parts, a printed interconnection and antenna, printed sensors, a capacitive electrode, a printed electrochromic display and piezo elements, a printed dielectric insulator and printable paper.

The jury identifies the project as a  breakthrough for commercialization of paper electronics.

"The identification of suitable materials, the increase of quality of materials used and the robustness of used processes are realized by special know-how built up in the project."

The verdict regarding the project's attractiveness was also positive:

"The product is attractive since it can be integrated in numerous commodity items. An anti-counterfeit tag integrated in a label for expensive goods helps the industry to protect itself against fraud. Large area shock detection integrated in packaging or other paper based elements will help to protect sensitive products and to trace unforeseen events. Finally these printed elements can be used for security documents and provides more intelligence to simple products, at a low-cost but in a reliable way.

Exchanging organic or inorganic substrate by paper will simplify recycling processes and reduce waste generation both, during processing and at the end-of-life of the product.

The demonstration of smart paper will also create innovations in completely different areas such as educational products, membranes and filters or security features."

‍