中文Xaar will exhibit on Stand E02 at TechBlick’s The Future of Electronics RESHAPED 2026, taking place October 21-22 at the Estrel Convention Center in Berlin, using the event to argue that inkjet has graduated from a graphic-arts technology into a credible tool for manufacturing functional, electronic devices. The company will present samples showing how inkjet is being applied across printed electronics and will focus on how printhead and fluid-management developments are enabling the controlled deposition of materials that fall well outside the low-viscosity fluids traditionally associated with printing.
“Advances in technology have vastly expanded the possible applications of inkjet in the printed electronics sector,” said Neil Cook, Head of Strategic Marketing at Xaar. Cook’s framing captures a shift that has been building for years. Where inkjet once meant laying down cyan, magenta, yellow, and black on paper, the same underlying capability, precisely placing tiny droplets of fluid where they are wanted, is now being aimed at conductive inks, adhesives, protective coatings, and the sundry functional materials that make an electronic device work. The hard part was never the idea but the physics: most functional materials are far more viscous, more abrasive, or more chemically demanding than a graphic ink, and conventional printheads were simply not built to handle them.
That is the engineering frontier Xaar intends to occupy. The company’s CTO, Karl Forbes, will present “Beyond Low-Viscosity Limits: Rethinking Inkjet for Production Electronics Manufacturing,” a talk that examines the requirements for scaling inkjet into electronics production rather than merely prototyping it. The distinction matters. Laboratories have demonstrated printed circuits and sensors for decades, but production manufacturing imposes ruthless demands on yield, repeatability, and cost per unit that benchtop success does not address. Moving from “we printed a working device” to “we can make a million of them reliably” is where most promising technologies stall.
TechBlick has positioned itself as the gathering point for exactly this conversation, drawing together material scientists, equipment makers, and end users who want to turn functional printing from a research curiosity into a supply chain. Berlin in late October will therefore be less a trade show than a working session on the future of additive, digitally controlled manufacturing. For Xaar, standing among that audience signals a strategic bet that the growth in inkjet will increasingly come from industrial functionality rather than from selling more graphic printers into a mature market.
The printed-electronics opportunity is genuinely large if the manufacturing hurdles fall. Think of sensors embedded in packaging, heating elements printed onto surfaces, antennas and circuits for flexible devices, and the countless small components where a digital, tool-free deposition process beats a subtractive, masked one. Each of those applications rewards the core strengths of inkjet: no screens or cliches to make, rapid design changes, and material usage that is closer to exact than to generous. As material formulations improve and printheads learn to handle them, the addressable space keeps widening.
Xaar’s emphasis on fluid management alongside the printhead is the quietly important detail. In functional printing, the printhead is only half the story; how the fluid is prepared, conditioned, and delivered determines whether the result is a clean functional layer or a defective one. Companies that own both sides of that problem are better placed to sell a complete, defensible solution rather than a component that the customer must integrate at their own risk.
For the print industry watching from the sidelines, the lesson is that the most interesting growth may lie in adjacent manufacturing rather than in fighting over share of a saturated graphic market. Xaar’s Berlin appearance is a compact statement of that thesis, and a reminder that the droplets printers have mastered for decoration are, with the right materials and engineering, becoming a tool for making things rather than merely marking them.
Source: INKISH.NEWS (16 October 2026) – Xaar to highlight inkjet for production electronics at TechBlick 2026.
What makes the Berlin appearance strategically interesting is the audience. TechBlick draws material scientists and product engineers rather than print buyers, which means Xaar is pitching its printheads as manufacturing components, not as printers. That reframing is essential for functional printing to scale, because the barrier has never been the idea of printing a circuit but the yield and reliability of doing so at volume. By demonstrating actual samples rather than slides, Xaar signals confidence that its technology is past the prototype stage. The focus on fluid management alongside the head is the honest admission that deposition is a system problem. If printed electronics is to become a meaningful share of industrial inkjet revenue, wins like this, at specialist venues with specialist buyers, are exactly where the category gets built, one qualified conversation at a time.
For Xaar, the event is a chance to meet the engineers who will specify its heads into next-generation production lines, a slower but higher-value sales motion than selling graphic printers.
