Silver nanowires offer good electrical conductivity, optical transparency, and flexibility, making it currently the major ITO replacement materials. However, the market progress varies a lot from application to application. Cambrios, a leading company in this area, can serve as a good case study to understand the current situation.

For Cambrios, more than half of its revenue comes from computer monitor touch screens; mobile phone touch screens are second, and there is minor revenue contribution from e-readers, tablets and laptop touch screens. Lenovo is one of its biggest customers in monitors, along with Dell and HP, while BenQ, Karbonn and HTC are some of its biggest mobile phone users.

The mobile phones use 100 Ω/sq films, where Cambrios’ current Jupiter films have 0.5% haze (the next generation, Mercury, will have 0.4% haze) and monitors 30 Ω/sq to 50 Ω/sq films, which have 0.8% haze for Jupiter (compared to 0.6% for Mercury). The company claims silver nanowires offer a cost advantage over indium tin oxide (ITO) in mobile phones and supply chain stability for tier-two OEMs, which often have trouble getting ITO when new Samsung and Apple models are under production.

Other than the above applications, Cambrios continues to supply inks for 10 Ω/sq films to organic photovoltaic (OPV) developers and 4 Ω/sq to 8 Ω/sq materials to organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting developers, where it has 12 and 15 customers, respectively.

Most of the OLED lighting interest comes from Japan, such as the Konica Minolta/Sumitomo Chemical JV and Panasonic. In the next few years, either the OLED lighting market will take off or companies will retool the technology. To improve its OLED lighting offering, it partnered with Hereaus to add PEDOT to its nanowire films to offer a planar film on which to deposit OLEDs. Cambrios expects to achieve 35% to 40% growth in 2015 – a dialing back of expectations from late 2014, when it was projecting that revenues would double in 2015.

Silver nanowire companies like Cambrios continue to have a strong position in touch screens, but should not spend much of its resources in OPV or OLED lighting. While they have a strong position through partnering with some of the leaders in those fields, those technologies will grow very slowly, if at all. Both OPV and OLED continue to suffer from cost, efficiency and lifetime limitations compared to competing inorganic materials.

Those companies should concentrate its resources and attention on touch screens where it outperforms ITO for large area touch due to low sheet resistance and high transparency, while it offers cost and supply chain stability in mobile devices. Look for silver nanowires to continue to grow on the back of touch screens, while OPV and OLED lighting remain an unproductive distraction.

Jonathan Melnick is a senior analyst on the Wearable and Flexible Electronics Intelligence team at Lux Research, which provides strategic advice and on-going intelligence for emerging technologies. He holds a Ph.D. with distinction, M.Phil and M.A. in chemistry from Columbia University and a B.S. with honors in chemistry from Syracuse University. For more information, visit Lux Research.