DESPITE the downturn in the electronics field, there continues to be a healthy demand for printed circuits, as more and more novel uses are found for them.
Wearable clothing that use electronic devices, mobile phones with flexible in-built antennae, and credit cards with the information stored within them - rather than on the traditional exposed magnetic strips - are now becoming the norm. Combine the industry's growing need to be environmentally-friendly with a new technique for producing flexible circuits at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods, and one Ayrshire company looks like it could be on to a winner.
Managing director Dick Heuchan spent nearly three decades working for IBM as an engineer and manager before taking early retirement six years ago. He explains to Iain Fleming why the development work carried out by his company, RT Circuits, in a Saltcoats starter unit could revolutionise the industry, and why it is in danger of being lost abroad.
''I was part of a team which was looking to produce new electronics products in the mid-90s. As part of our research we came across a project being undertaken by Brunel Univer-sity, funded by the government, to find innovative ways of eliminating the pollution and waste which is an inevitable part of the most popular way of producing printed circuit boards.
This is a subtractive process which involves an expensive pre-laminated substrate being covered in copper, and then the areas around the etched circuits removed by using chemicals. As much as 90% to 95% of the copper-covered surface area will be removed in this process, leading to a large problem in reclaiming and disposing of chemicals and metals.
Another way is to build up the circuit by using conductive ink forced through a silk screen, which is called thick film printing, and is the minority process.
Brunel came up with a method of creating circuits using standard offset lithographic printing techniques, which allow for producing lines which are only five microns thick, as opposed to 25 microns using thick film printing.
The advantage is that you can have a higher definition product with much finer lines placed closer together, and because these machines are so fast you can produce 6000 sheets per hour on a standard offset litho costing (pounds) 50,000, that would cost (pounds) 1m to buy that type of cap-acity on a silk screen machine.
We have received private sector funding of around (pounds) 1m over the last 21 months, and despite asking for help from the public sector, we have been unable to get the type of assistance necessary to take the project forward. Nobody at the higher level seems to have been able to grasp the bigger picture, and there is now a danger this opportunity will be lost to the country.
We are a small company with 11 people either in full-time or sub-contracted work, and while we don't see ourselves becoming a large job creator - perhaps growing to 20 or 30 jobs - we do see ourselves becoming a large wealth creator, mainly through supplying the necessary raw materials and licensing.
We believe we have tech-nology which is world-beating, will generate a lot of money for the business and the country through production jobs and licensing fees. While we have been talking to some large companies, in the interim we are looking for support from the Scottish financial markets to build this enterprise into a multi-million pound sellable business, hopefully within Scotland.''
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