In the past few months we've seen great interest in using graphene for 3D Printing. This is being investigated by several companies , including Grafoid, Graphene 3D Labs, AGT, Kibaran and Qingdao Unique Products.

Now two new companies have joined this race. First we have Graphene Technologies and Stratasys, who announced a partnership to co-develop graphene-enhanced 3D-printing materials. Stratasys is a leading 3D printing company, worth over $5 billion, and this effort will be partly funded by the US-Israeli BIRD Foundation.

Germany-based Microdrop Technologies reports that they tested graphene for for applications in micro printing, 3D printing and other related applications - and it exhibited excellent quality and characteristics. The company used graphene provided by Talga Resources.

Graphene Frontier, spun off from the University of Pennsylvania to develop the Atmospheric Pressure CVD (APCVD) roll-to-roll process, raised $1.6 million in Series Seed B funding. Graphene Frontiers will use the money to hire additional researchers, expand the lab facilities and accelerate the development of their proprietary GFET sensors and manufacturing process.

The company recently launched the "six sensors" brand for highly-sensitive chemical and biological GFET-based sensors. These are especially promising to diagnose diseases with multiple markers such as cancers and illnesses currently diagnosed using ELISA technologies. In November 2013 we posted an article describing Graphene Frontier's technology and business.

IBM is an embarking on an ambitious project to find the next-generation chip technology to replace silicon. IBM will invest $3 billion over the next find years in this project. IBM will look into graphene, carbon nanotubes, quantum computing, silicon photonics and other technologies. IBM says that it is getting more and more difficult to shrink silicon chips further and silicon is reaching its limits.

The $600-per year budget will be re-allocated from IBM's existing R&D budget, which is $6 billion a year. So this huge project represents a 10% shift in the company's R&D activities.

Researchers from Philips, Graphenea and the University of Cambridge developed a monochrome OLED device that uses graphene as the transparent conductor layer. They report that the graphene-based TC outperforms that state-of-the-art ITO solutions currently used for OLED panels.

ITO is the most popular material for transparent conductors in displays and solar cells, but it is expensive, rare and brittle, and a lot of companies are developing alternatives - based on silver, carbon or other materials. Graphene by itself is not a good electrode material because the concentration of the charge carriers is low - which means that you need to dope it with excess carriers - while leaving it flexible and transparent. To achieve that, the team used a metal oxide film (molybdenum trioxide, MoO₃) as an intermediate layer between the graphene and the OLED layers. The graphene was produced using a CVD process. The researchers were able to achieve excellent power efficiency - better than the ITO reference device.