Beta site under development
Flexible Printed Technology Provider
Founded in 1969 as NFI or Nameplates for Industry, the small manufacturing operation offered nameplates, faceplates, keypad overlays and other industrial products. The company has since evolved into an electronics technology provider for printed electronics, flexible printed circuits and other, polymer film-based electronics. We have achieved many key milestones such as supplying Sir Clive Sinclair with their ZX80 and Spectrum keyboards, building over 30 million keyboards for IBM home computers and, with 50+ years’ experience in industrial manufacturing, we have become a well-known leader within the printed electronics industry.
Parlex were acquired by Johnson Electric in 2005, our multinational parent company who span 4 continents and 22 countries. When joining Johnson Electric, we were introduced to exciting new skills and expertise and a passion for deeper understanding of the physics of our design and materials. This has allowed us to be at the forefront of product development, offering a world class, bespoke service, and bringing customers innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions.
From our facility on the Isle of Wight we drive the design and development of all new printed electronics products whilst manufacture is carried out in our APAC facility and in 2021, we changed our business model from manufacturing to design and development. This ensured our connection with critical skills available locally on the island and allowed us to focus on growth through design, development, and innovation. We now have a global Engineering hub for printed electronics at our new development centre with high-end capabilities in test and analysis and full prototyping for the design of flexible printed circuits and printed electronics.
With a global customer base, and our key strategic markets of Automotive and Industrial applications, our core products of HMI (Human Machine Interface), Vision (automotive exterior lighting, front grille animation and flexible heaters for LiDAR’s and cameras) and BMSI (Battery Management Systems Interconnects) are widely used with our impressive roster of automotive customers such as Ferrari, Bugatti, Tesla, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, VW, Renault, Citroen etc. and industrial clients such as Miele, B|S|H (Bosch & Siemens), Lavazza, Vorwerk, Ingenico etc..
Put simply, our engineers are building the future - numerous ground-breaking technological innovations from automotive condensation management to the control panel for Smart Bar; a dashboard mounted interaction light bar, optimising space and featuring an impressive multifunctional control element with a transparent look. With the device extending the entire width of the car dashboard into the front door panel trims, Smart Bar evolves driver and vehicle interaction, combines fingertip function control and ambient dynamic lighting into one fully integrated component which debuts in the new BMW i7 as a new control and design element.
We want to be seen as agile leaders in the electronics field, where continuous innovation is critical. As an example, our electronic tracking designs, found in IBM keyboards, use 2mm wide tracking that was perfectly acceptable for a keyboard of that generation. However, we recognised that with electronics miniaturisation, it would require a track size reduction to match. With material and design engineering, we have reduced track width to 0.05mm or 50µm - equivalent to the width of a human hair - using rheology with our own silver ink systems we can produce ultra-fine traces and refinement of manufacturing processes to optimise ink transfer through screen printing. And our innovation won’t stop there; current developments use Nano based particle inks that allow us to reduce track width even further to achieve our target of 0.01mm (10µm) further reducing size and weight of our products.
Our organisational vision is “what does it take?” rather than” is it possible?” and this is delivered by our employees with their full focus on the task in hand. Our foundation of knowledge, built up over many years, has underpinned the strength of our business and our design development decisions.
