A decade of flexible circuit innovation and growth. (Flexible thinking).(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

During the decade of the 1990s and into the first years of the new millennium, flexible Circuits have enjoyed sustained growth. Annual sales in the U.S. flexible circuit market grew from approximately $400 million in 1991 to roughly $1 billion in 2000. The fuel for that market expansion was innovation in the growth of applications for flexible circuit technology. One way to track this is to look at issued patents regarding the sale of flexible circuits (Figure 1).

The figure reveals there is a correlation over the decade between sales and issued U.S. patents that either use flexible circuit technology or advance the state of flexible circuit materials and process technology. This is a cursory look only, and it is necessary to acknowledge that there is a time lag between innovation and implementation. The lag time also varies significantly from market sector to market sector. For example, when compared to consumer products, which can be rapidly ramped to production, medical products have very long lead-times from invention to market, due to regulatory constraints.

In reviewing patents covering the decade, one will find that flexible circuit technology is being increasingly employed in a wide range of areas. Many new inventions are facilitated by the use of flexible circuits: medicine delivery and medical diagnostic systems, components, cameras, sensors, toys, and sound systems, just to name a few.

Some themes were recurring, however. For example, a significant number of patents referencing flexible circuits have been issued for IC packaging technologies. This comes without too much surprise, and it was flexible circuit-based packaging that ushered in the chip scale packaging era during the mid-1990s. While there is not space or time here to review all of the patents issued, two ...