Introducing the Program – Material, Ink and Paste Innovations
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Why Should You Join TechBlick's The Future of Electronics RESHAPED?
The Future of Electronics RESHAPED conference and exhibition (21 & 22 OCT 2026, Estrel Congress Centre, Berlin) is set to be the most important event of the year focused on additive, hybrid, 3D, sustainable, wearable, soft and textile electronics. The event is co-located with Electronic Textiles RESHAPED, Sustainable Electronics RESHAPED, and Perovskite Connect.
In this article, we highlight various innovative talks around the theme of material, ink and paste innovations — the formulations that sit at the heart of every printed device. From silver-coated copper and room-temperature copper processing to biosensor inks, graphene formulations, and the substrates and adhesives that everything is printed on. In future articles, we will cover digital deposition, manufacturing and hybrid integration, and printed applications.
Explore the full agenda now and register to join the event — one pass gives you access to all four co-located shows, the exhibition, and the TechBlick on-demand library.
Conductive Inks & Pastes: The Silver Question and the Copper Answer
With silver prices and price volatility at record highs, the search for cost-effective, high-performance conductor materials has never been more urgent.
Ames Goldsmith (USA) – Daniel Lacorte presents advances in silver-coated copper materials for high-performance printed electronics. As geopolitical uncertainty drives silver prices to new heights, core-shell silver-coated copper powders and flakes are gaining strong interest as a cost-effective alternative to pure silver. The talk discusses the development of robust silver-coated copper that combats potential reliability issues from copper oxidation, ionic copper leaching, and their influence on pot-life duration.
University of Southampton (United Kingdom) – Jessica Pereira presents a patented copper platform enabling room-temperature fabrication of highly conductive, air-stable copper films — no thermal or photonic sintering required. Using biopolymer-stabilised particles and mechanical compression, the technology achieves excellent electrical properties (2.05–2.33 × 10⁻⁸ Ωm) and compatibility with paper, textiles, and other temperature-sensitive substrates using water-based, sustainable formulations. Demonstrated devices include conductive paper circuits and electroluminescent systems, with applications spanning RFID, disposable sensors, papertronics, and e-textiles. The team is actively seeking industrial partners for licensing and scale-up.
Henkel (Germany)– Jacqueline Putz presents a masterclass on Electrically Conductive Inks: Formulation, Printing, and Applications. This session covers ink formulations, manufacturing, and key parameters across various printing processes. A special focus will be placed on the importance of ink compatibility testing, complete with real-life examples and troubleshooting strategies for screen printing.
Heraeus Electronics – Ryan Banfield presents Ag Inks for Stretchable Electronics. Diving deeper into design considerations for elastic polymer thick film materials, this presentation explores how specialized silver formulations deliver reliable performance under continuous mechanical deformation in wearable and medical applications.
Functional & Specialty Inks: Biosensors, Graphene, and Beyond
Sun Chemical (USA) – Phil Nicholas discusses "The Balancing Act" for electrochemical biosensor inks: the interplay between ink design, processing, and end-use performance, with a focus on the latest advances in materials for screen-printed electrodes (SPE) used in electrochemical sensors — a market spanning glucose test strips to next-generation diagnostics.
BLACKLEAF (France) – Anaghim Nasri presents water-based graphene inks as a sustainable innovation for thermal heating elements. BLACKLEAF's approach targets high-performance printed heaters while avoiding solvent-heavy formulations, aligning graphene's exceptional thermal and electrical properties with greener chemistry.
ACI Materials (USA) – ACI Materials joins us in Berlin to present its latest functional material innovations. At TechBlick USA 2025, ACI presented advanced printable conductors enabling fully additive manufacturing of durable flexible hybrid electronics, wearables, and e-textiles — offering improved solderability, finer print resolution, and support for smaller surface-mounted devices, while addressing a key reliability weakness of traditional conductive adhesives: galvanic corrosion under damp heat. Built on ACI's patented cavitation-based dispersion process and its Alchemy semi-sintering conductor series, these materials combine the processability of polymer thick films with the electrical performance of sintered inks. The Berlin talk title and abstract are still being finalized — this preview draws on ACI's recent TechBlick presentations.
Ercon (USA) – Ercon will present its conductive ink technologies for printed sensing. Established in 1967, Ercon manufactures conductive polymer thick-film inks — silver, silver/silver chloride, carbon, graphite, platinum, and gold, plus insulating layers — used in billions of blood glucose test strips and body electrodes worldwide. Expect deep expertise on materials for electrochemical sensors and medical electrodes. Final talk details to be announced in the agenda.
Substrates & Material Interfaces: The Unsung Heroes
Every printed device is a materials system — and the substrate and adhesive layers are just as decisive as the functional ink.
Avery Dennison (USA/Belgium) – Jarne Machiels maps ink/adhesive compatibility in flexible hybrid electronics — "beyond the holy grail." An intensive validation program tested diverse pressure-sensitive adhesive tape technologies in direct contact with various functional inks. The primary finding: there is no single holy-grail adhesive; compatibility is a multi-variable equation dependent on the chemistry of both ink and adhesive matrix. The talk introduces a validated methodology for evaluating ink/adhesive interfaces under accelerated ageing, breaks down the key factors engineers must consider to avoid unexpected field failures, and shares real-world applications where validated combinations even enabled elimination of layers and cost.
Covestro (Germany) – Klas-Moritz Kossel presents tailored TPU films for flexible and stretchable printing substrates. As printed electronics and wearables enter markets demanding lightweight, thin, and flexible solutions, thermoplastic polyurethane films can be extensively tailored to each application's requirements — showing particularly promising properties as substrates for printed sensor systems.
Kimoto (Switzerland/Japan) – Christoph Bosshard presents carrier and protection films for production processes. These films enable the handling of sensitive surfaces and flexible substrates in industrial processes — a quietly critical role as printed electronics scales up. Backed by Kimoto's decades of expertise in roll-to-roll coated functional films, the talk focuses on production processes and the options for sustainable scaling from lab to fab.
Policrom Screens (Italy) – Giorgio Vavassori Bisutti presents TPU as a substrate technology for printed, hybrid, stretchable, and wearable electronics. At TechBlick USA 2025, Policrom introduced ELECROM STRETCH, a TPU-based substrate and encapsulation system designed to maintain elasticity, dimensional accuracy, and conductivity through multi-layer builds — enabling reliable integration of stretchable electronics, such as pressure sensors in gloves, into textiles. The Berlin talk will bring this substrate story to the e-textile audience. The final abstract will be confirmed in the agenda.
Stretchable, Washable, Sustainable Inks and Substrates
Because one pass covers all four co-located shows, materials-minded attendees should also mark these ink, paste, and substrate talks from the Electronic Textiles RESHAPED and Sustainable Electronics RESHAPED
Leibniz-Institute for New Materials (Germany) – Christoph Kaiser presents screen-printable hybrid conductive inks for stretchable temperature sensing and heating, based on a hybrid metal–carbon filler network in a stretchable matrix. Characterized from 20 to 120 °C under repeated thermal and mechanical cycling, optimized formulations show a linear resistance response with temperature coefficients enabling thermal sensing or active temperature control even after tens of thousands of strain cycles — a versatile platform for textiles, medical applications like smart wound dressings, and soft robotics.
Nagase ChemteX (Japan) – Nagase ChemteX presents stretchable, wearable, and washable inks meeting the requirements of next-generation electronic textiles — where conductive materials must survive not just bending but stretching, sweat, and repeated wash cycles without losing performance. The detailed abstract will follow in the agenda.
Fraunhofer IZM (Germany) – Lukas Werft leads a masterclass on gallium-based liquid metal inks for highly reliable printed stretchable electronics — a materials-science deep dive into how formulation governs viscosity, wetting, line formation, and electrical continuity, covering polymer–solvent systems, droplet morphology, oxide-mediated stabilization, and process windows for dispensing and screen printing.
Join Us in Berlin
At the exhibition you will also meet many of the world's leading ink, paste, and substrate suppliers, alongside equipment makers and print houses — the full materials value chain in one place.
Your pass also includes the co-located Perovskite Connect, Electronic Textiles RESHAPED, and Sustainable Electronics RESHAPED — four world-class events, one venue, one ticket.
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