Kateeva Joins Forces with Sumitomo Chemical

Kateeva announced a key partnership with Sumitomo Chemical Company, Ltd.,  a global solution organic light emitting diode (OLED) materials leader. Kateeva is a leading provider of novel inkjet printing equipment for OLED mass production. The non-exclusive agreement calls for Sumitomo to pair its world-class inks with Kateeva’s world-class YIELDjet platform to help speed affordable OLED TVs to market.
 
The collaboration aims to make it easier for display manufacturers to deploy inkjet-printed red green blue (RGB) OLED for large-size TVs. Success depends on achieving a perfect interaction of advanced materials and cutting-edge mass-production equipment. Kateeva and Sumitomo will cooperate to co-develop high-quality reference data for customers. They’ll leverage Sumitomo inks and Kateeva’s inkjet OLED mass-production platform to optimize the manufacturing process to achieve optimum OLED device performance.
 
Kateeva’s YIELDjet platform is an enabler of OLED mass production. The newly introduced YIELDjet FLEX product enables low-cost, high-yield thin film encapsulation (TFE) for flexible OLED displays. It is the first product to emerge from the YIELDjet platform and offers an alternative to older less efficient vacuum evaporation technologies. The same platform can be applied to print RGB OLED TVs.
 
Sumitomo Chemical’s OLED material, which is the polymer OLED (PLED) type, is suitable for printing, and enables effective mass production of large-size OLED displays. Sumitomo’s PLED material has already achieved excellent performance for TV applications, and the company is continuously improving its material performance.
 
Kateeva CTO Steven Van Slyke called the partnership a key step forward for the OLED industry. “OLED TVs have long captivated consumers but remain beyond reach for many due to high production costs. Inkjet printing can change that, given the right combination of materials and equipment,” Van Slyke noted. “Our collaboration with Sumitomo will speed high-performance inkjet-printed OLED devices to market by optimizing industry-leading materials and equipment to mass produce reliable, affordable OLED TVs.”
 
Beyond flexible OLEDs, OLED TV is the next natural application for Kateeva’s YIELDjet platform. Joining forces with Sumitomo gives Kateeva a strategic lead in the fast-growing sector. The YIELDjet platform is a strong fit, particularly for its pure-nitrogen process chamber. It shields OLED materials from moisture and air (known degraders of quality), and enables consistently superior device lifetime, especially crucial T95 lifetime. T95 lifetime describes the time it takes for a display element to lose 5% of its initial brightness. The most difficult customer spec to meet, it determines the resilience of the display against image burn in. The nitrogen processing technology found in Kateeva’s YIELDjet platform dramatically improves T95, thereby enabling customers to more rapidly move inkjet OLED into mass production.
 
This Kateeva/Sumitomo partnership is intentionally non-exclusive. Its broader aim is to equip the global display industry with novel tools and technologies to help mainstream OLED TVs. Kateeva and Sumitomo are free to partner with others. For their part, customers may use Sumitomo inks with non-Kateeva inkjet printers, and Kateeva inkjet printers with inks provided by non-Sumitomo vendors.