Dr. Chih-I Wu, ITRI's Vice President and General Director of Electronic and Optoelectronic System Research Laboratories, remarked that unlike the past when electronic products featured standardized specifications, the focus today is more towards flexible and customized production. This trend of producing limited quantities of a variety of products is forcing Taiwan's PCB industry to emphasize smart manufacturing, which will enable companies to satisfy the demands of customers efficiently. In light of this, ITRI is making every effort to provide the PCB supply chain with technology to enable them to move from "automated" to "smart" manufacturing.

Dr. Wu further stressed that roll-to-roll (R2R) fine line technology, an additive manufacturing method to replace photolithography, constitutes a technological breakthrough for ITRI. In tandem with ITRI's Self-guided Additive Manufacturing for Minimum Carbon Emission with Roll-to-roll Production Systems (SAMMCERS), a finalist for 2016 R&D 100 Awards, the R2R process can achieve low-carbon and smart manufacturing.

Meanwhile, ITRI's UHF Systems Laboratory, which is state-of-the-art in Taiwan, creates an R&D environment for the design, measurement, and validation of UHF millimeter wave systems, offering a comprehensive capacity to test circuit boards. This will be conducive to providing the PCB industry solutions amid the need for fine line and high frequency/speed products.

For example, Additive Process for Printed Fine Line Circuits, ITRI's Additive Process for Printed Fine Line Circuits involves special materials, innovative printing equipment, and gravure offset printing technology. Breakthroughs enable high resolution printing of patterns with line width of under 5 µm. Even more important is that this eco-friendly manufacturing technology can reduce the maximum by over 80% the amount of materials used and by over 60% the power consumption.

At the same time, this technology can be applied to curved glass and PET plastics. Circuits will be able to be printed directly on dashboards or on curvatures in robotic arms used on production lines. This development will effectively expand the range of uses and possibilities in circuit design. Presently, ITRI and Career Technology (Mfg.) Co., Ltd. are collaborating on FPC production for smartphone and tablet computer touch modules.