Thin Film Electronics (Thinfilm) has recently announced that it has completed the purchasing of manufacturing equipment to be used in the roll-to-roll production of its Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) tags. The equipment will be housed at Thinfilm's new facility in Silicon Valley and is expected to be operational in the fourth quarter of 2017.
Additionally, Thinfilm is on schedule regarding the purchase of additional manufacturing equipment necessary to enable the roll-to-roll line to also produce Printed Dopant Polysilicon (PDPS) digital circuitry used in fabricating front-end die for Thinfilm's NFC SpeedTap and OpenSense tags. The Company expects to complete purchasing of the remainder of the operational line by Q2 2017.
By migrating production from sheet-based to roll-based lines, Thinfilm is expecting to increase the capacity of its EAS and NFC product lines to the billions of units annually when fully installed. Following start of production of EAS later in 2017, first commercial production of roll-based manufacturing of front-end die for NFC products is expected by Q3 2018.