On 19 November at the British IET Annual Innovation Award Ceremony, Professor Zheng Cui and his research team won the “Highly Commended” Award, jointly with O-film Technology in the Award’s Manufacturing Category. This is the first time a research institute and enterprise from Mainland China ever entered the finals of the Award since 2003 when the IET Innovation Award started.
The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) is one of the largest technological Institutions in the world, with more than 160 thousand members distributed in 127 countries. There is an IET branch in Beijing, China, as well. The IET Innovation Award was established in 2003, aiming to select and award the best innovations each year around world in different areas of engineering and technology. It is the 10th this year with more than 400 entries coming from 22 countries, competing in 16 categories of awards. The Printable Electronics Research Center (PERC) of Suzhou Institute of Nanotech, Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with O-film Technology, is among the few which have reached the finals. The technology which has won the “Highly Commended” Award is a new hybrid printing process for making metal mesh transparent conductive films used in touch panels, invented by PERC researchers and implemented in large scale manufacturing at O-film Technology who is the largest touch panels producer in China and globally. This is the second time that the PERC researchers have won an international prestigious award after the Printed Electronics Award they won at the Printed Electronics Europe conference in April. It demonstrated that Chinese researchers and engineers can produce international leading inventions and China is well on the path to transform from “Made in China” to “Created in China”.
