Electronics Protection - Fall 2015 - (Page 30)

Industry News Global Data Center Cooling Market is Expected To Reach $11.65 Billion, by 2020 According to a new report by Allied Market Research titled, "Global Data Center Cooling Market - Size, Share, Global Trend, Company Profiles, Demand, Insights, Analysis, Research, Report, Opportunities, Segmentation, and Forecast 2014 - 2020", the global data center cooling market is expected to reach $11.65 billion by 2020, registering a CAGR of 13.17 percent during 2014-2020. Precision Air Conditioning (PAC) would drive the market significantly by the year 2020, as its setup cost is comparatively less than Precision Air Handling Unit (PAHU). The data center cooling system market primarily includes two components chillers and air conditioners. Chillers contributed to 70 percent of total global data centre cooling market in 2013. Amongst all verticals, telecom and IT, are the major contributors to the market revenue of the data center cooling market. The growing number of applications in healthcare and retail sector have a good scope in the data center cooling solutions. A large amount of data processing is required due to the rapid increase in e-commerce sites and growth in hospital data. Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), energy and others sector will prove as a moderate contributor, in terms of revenue, for the global data centre cooling market. The cooling technology giant, Emerson, launched an extended-size version of the ultra-silent outdoor coil condenser for data centre cooling systems which features an increased capacity of 220 KW. Increase in data volume and cloud adoption are the major market drivers for the growth of this market. The North American region will prove to be a major revenue contributor in the data center cooling market during the forecast period. However, with the rise in industrialization, the Asia-Pacific market would also be a key region in the cooling market. The growth of the data center cooling market is supplemented by big data processing which requires more cooling solutions. Companies like Emerson, Schneider and Rittal are enhancing their cooling capacity to reduce extra power consumption. In order to gain higher market share, companies are adopting product launches along with acquisition and partnership as prime strategies. Prominent companies profiled in the report include Emerson, Schneider, Rittal, Stulz, IBM, HP, AdavtiveCOOL and Hitachi. Status of Flexible Encapsulation to Enable Flexible Electronics In 2020 flexible barrier manufacturing for flexible electronic devices such as displays will be a market worth more than US$184 million according to IDTechEx Research. That equates to 3.8 million square meters of flexible barrier films for electronics. Although multilayer approaches (usually organic and inorganic layers) have been the most popular solution for flexible encapsulation so far, there is significant development work with solutions based on single layer approaches such as flexible glass or atomic layer deposition (ALD) which could, in later years, capture part of the market. The table below, compiled by IDTechEx analysts shows some of the characteristics of flexible glass and ALD films as developers are looking to bring them to market. Flexible glass is a significant technical achievement yet IDTechEx Research believes that it will not be the solution of choice for encapsulation of flexible electronics in the short to medium term, for multiple reasons. In spite of the marketing spin given by the manufacturers, glass is inherently a fragile material and requires specialized handling and processing. While plastic materials can also be damaged, there is an important difference between the two: damage of barriers on plastic can lead to the failure of a 30 Fall 2015 * www.ElectronicsProtectionMagazine.com specific part, however, shattering of glass, even if protective sheets are used, leads to particle contamination on the defect line able to affect multiple parts. Inherent fragility of flexible glass makes sheet edges critical. All suppliers propose protective tabs to reduce the problem. However, any other particle on the processing equipment could also become a focal point of stress and lead to shattering of the glass sheet or web. A strong point of traditional glass encapsulation (especially for top emission devices) has been its ability to form truly hermetic packaging by using glass frit and laser sealing. This advantage may not be transferable to flexible glass where glass-to-glass sealing may be very problematic and difficult because points of stress and relative twisting of the two sheets must be avoided in the laser firing of the frit. It may be that flexible glass has to be used in combination with adhesives (and desiccants). Flexibility is another issue. Although glass is very flexible if flexed along a well-defined axis, it can be poor at tolerating any stress out of axis, so much so that twisting the sheet may lead to fracture. This is true with or without protective film applied to the glass. Extreme flexibility (r< 2-3 mm) may also be a problem. Data that has been shown would put the flexibility limit around r= 2.5 cm. Consequently, flexible glass as an encapsulant superstrate or substrate may be good for conformal applications, but for truly flexible applications there seem to be several challenges to be overcome. The thermal stability of flexible glass makes it the best choice as substrate for back-planes of high-resolution high-end large displays. Glass enables improved resolution and good registration between layers during processing compared to plastic substrates like PET, PEN, and PI. However, IDTechEx analysts and other affiliate experts have only seen results with metal oxide backplanes only so far (Tprocess < 350°C), none with LTPS backplanes (Tprocess < 450°C). If processability up to 450°C is indeed possible, flexible glass would be a very good choice as a substrate for flexible AMOLED TV. Those devices are bottom emission (BE) AMOLED, normally have a metal foil as back encapsulant, a higher cost tolerance. Regarding R2R processing of flexible glass, it has demonstrated possible. Manufacturing by R2R will require specialized tools not differently than fabrication of barrier in R2R. The multi-layer approach if correctly implemented on dedicated tools may have the potential to be low cost but an open question remains as to how low the defect density of barrier on foil can be. Consequently, it is an open question what the maximum size of displays that can be encapsulated with compatible yield can be. As it transpires from the discussion above, plastic engineered superstrate (=encapsulant foil) may be better for smaller devices (wearable, phone, tablets), while flexible glass may be better for TVs and in general larger displays. Additionally, the smoothness of plastic films, even with smoothing layers, is not as good as glass (0.2 nm). This may be a problem for organic TFT backplanes. Finally optical transmission below 400nm require glass as substrate since PET and PEN have a cut off around 400 nm (PEN). IDTechEx does not see this as a critical limitation for general display applications (it may be for OPV). ALD is another flexible encapsulation technology receiving a lot of attention with several players currently developing solutions based on it. It seems like it is not a short-term solution, if it will ever be one as a stand-alone layer but ALD may be a solution in a multi-layer stack in combination with a sputtered or PECVD layer if it would be possible to find a good cost structure. Regarding the intrinsic properties of the material, ALD film deposited at low temperature (T<80 C) have a superior quality when tested at room temperature. A single ALD layer less-than 50 nm thick can perform http://www.ElectronicsProtectionMagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Electronics Protection - Fall 2015

Electronics Protection - Fall 2015
Contents
Editor's Choice
Beat the Heat: Six Best Practices for Protecting Your People and Your Business from Arc Flash Hazards
Data Center Design and Cooling for Sensitive Electronics
Electronic Access Solutions - Design Considerations for Your Data Center
An Unsung Hero: the Gas Discharge Tube
Innovation Demands That You Break the Rules
Enclosures
Thermal
Power
Hardware
Industry News
Calendar of Events

Electronics Protection - Fall 2015