Displays Inkjet-printing and the Production of Flexible OLED Displays

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Flexible smartphones and color-saturated television displays were some of the highlights at the last Consumer Electronics Showcase, held in Las Vegas.

Many of the displays were made using organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) - semiconducting films about 100 nanometers thick, made of organic compounds and sandwiched between two electrodes, that emit light in response to electricity.

This allows each individual pixel of an OLED screen to emit red, green, and blue, without a backlight, to use less energy and produce more saturated color. The film can be coated onto flexible, plastic substrates.

But there’s a reason why these darlings of the showroom are not readily available on shelves: They’re not very cost-effective to make en masse. Now, MIT spinout Kateeva has developed an "inkjet printing" system for OLED displays that could cut manufacturing costs enough to pave the way for mass-producing flexible and large-screen models.

In doing so, Kateeva aims to "fix the last 'Achilles' heel' of the OLED-display industry: manufacturing," says Kateeva co-founder and scientific advisor Vladimir Bulovic, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology, who co-invented the technology.

Inkjet Printer as a Platform

Called YIELDjet, Kateeva’s technology platform is a massive version of an inkjet printer. Large glass or plastic substrate sheets are placed on a long, wide platform. A component with custom nozzles moves rapidly, back and forth, across the substrate, coating it with OLED and other materials - much as a printer drops ink onto paper.

Kateeva has developed tools for two specific areas of OLED production line processes - each using the YIELDjet platform. The first, called YIELDjet FLEX, was engineered to enable thin-film encapsulation (TFE). TFE is the process that gives thinness and flexibility to OLED devices; Kateeva hopes flexible displays produced by YIELDjet FLEX will hit the shelves very soon.

A second tool, debuting later, aims to cut costs and defects associated with patterning OLED materials onto substrates, in order to make producing 55-inch screens easier.

By boosting yields, as well as speeding up production and reducing both materials and maintenance time, the system aims to cut manufacturing costs by about 50 percent, says Kateeva co-founder and CEO Conor Madigan, who says: "That combination of improving the speed, improving the yield, and improving the maintenance is what mass-production manufacturers want. Plus, the system is scalable, which is really important as the display industry shifts to larger substrate sizes".

The other Kateeva co-founders and technology co-inventors are MIT Provost Martin Schmidt, now a scientific advisor; Jianglong Chen, now program director; and Valerie Leblanc, now staff scientist.

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