After almost half a millennium of technological development, printing technologies have achieved a level to fulfill their mission: to satisfy the demands of a faithful human reception of the whole variety of shape and color from nature by discrete colored screen dots on substrates (e.g. paper, foil). Nowadays improvements of industrial printing are more or less solely limited to improvements of the production efficiency. During the last decade, several R&D and business approaches have been published which employ printing technologies for the production of items with functionalities other than color images. In case of these new applications, the major advantage of printing technologies is the full additivity of the material deposition addressing exactly the geometrical areas where it is needed – without lithography. Beyond that, the digital printing technique inkjet allows the handling of smallest amounts of rare (and therefore costly) functional materials. In our paper we introduce our strategy of functional printing that exploits the potential of cutting-edge printing technologies for the digital fabrication of items with advanced – i.e. “not only graphical” – functionalities. The presented examples comprise concepts for printed energy storage devices, packages with RFID functionality, printed membranes and micro sieves, electrically conducting tracks and outline further approaches to manufacture devices and components of organic and large-area electronics. The implementation of functional printing requires well-directed interdisciplinary efforts to manufacture stacks of functional layers and to understand their structure-property relationships. In many cases the envisaged functionality is directly related rather to the nanoscopic structures than to bulk materials properties. We introduce the integrated research approach of Printed Functionalities in Chemnitz comprising Chemnitz University of Technology for science, the Fraunhofer Institution for Electronic Nanosystems (FhG ENAS) for applied science and industrialization as well as world-class companies on the Chemnitz Smart Systems Campus for the exploitation of future organic and large-area electronics products.

After almost half a millennium of technological development, printing technologies have achieved a level to fulfill their mission: to satisfy the demands of a faithful human reception of the whole variety of shape and color from nature by discrete colored screen dots on substrates (e.g. paper, foil). Nowadays improvements of industrial printing are more or less solely limited to improvements of the production efficiency. During the last decade, several R&D and business approaches have been published which employ printing technologies for the production of items with functionalities other than color images. In case of these new applications, the major advantage of printing technologies is the full additivity of the material deposition addressing exactly the geometrical areas where it is needed – without lithography. Beyond that, the digital printing technique inkjet allows the handling of smallest amounts of rare (and therefore costly) functional materials. In our paper we introduce our strategy of functional printing that exploits the potential of cutting-edge printing technologies for the digital fabrication of items with advanced – i.e. “not only graphical” – functionalities. The presented examples comprise concepts for printed energy storage devices, packages with RFID functionality, printed membranes and micro sieves, electrically conducting tracks and outline further approaches to manufacture devices and components of organic and large-area electronics. The implementation of functional printing requires well-directed interdisciplinary efforts to manufacture stacks of functional layers and to understand their structure-property relationships. In many cases the envisaged functionality is directly related rather to the nanoscopic structures than to bulk materials properties. We introduce the integrated research approach of Printed Functionalities in Chemnitz comprising Chemnitz University of Technology for science, the Fraunhofer Institution for Electronic Nanosystems (FhG ENAS) for applied science and industrialization as well as world-class companies on the Chemnitz Smart Systems Campus for the exploitation of future organic and large-area electronics products.