OLEDWorks Co-Founders Michael Boroson and John Hamer Honored by ACS

Dr. Michael Boroson and Dr. John Hamer, co-founders of OLEDWorks, have been selected as the 2021 Entrepreneurs of the Year by the Rochester Section of the American Chemical Society. The award is in recognition of their development of innovative new chemistry and manufacturing technology for OLED-based lighting and its successful commercialization.

They will be recognized at the Section’s Annual Dinner to be held on Nov. 10, 2021. This award, recognizing their impressive technical and business achievements, highlights the continuing central role of chemistry in the economic development of the Rochester area.

Dr. Boroson and Dr. Hamer founded OLEDWorks in 2010 to develop unique lighting panels based on organic light emitting diode (OLED) technology, originally developed in the 1980s at the Kodak Research Laboratories as a display technology. Having been part of the OLED program at Kodak, when Kodak sold their OLED business in 2009, they saw an opportunity to apply their expertise, and that of some other former Kodak researchers, in the lighting market, taking advantage of the unique properties of OLEDs to provide low power, thin and flexible lighting panels.

After licensing OLED technology patents in 2011 from Global OLED Technology, the com-pany that then held Kodak’s IP on this technology, they began OLEDWorks with a staff of eight in space at a former Delco/Valeo facility on Lyell Ave.

The small company started as a consulting firm and found customers world-wide. Within a year, they spent all their earnings on OLED R&D equipment that was being auctioned by Kodak and started a 5000 square foot research facility on Lyell Avenue. Soon afterward, they met Dave DeJoy of the local accounting firm DBK. With DeJoy as CEO, they established a viable business plan and were able to raise funds to design and build a small production facility adjacent to their R&D space.

The next few years were tough, according to COO John Hamer.

“The OLED layer thicknesses needed to be correct to within a few nanometers, and the encapsulation to protect the OLED from moisture needed to be perfect,” said Hamer. “We improved production controls and developed more robust formulations, but still encapsulation was a challenge.”

Michael Boroson, CTO, found a used Atomic Layer Deposition machine held by a bank due to a foreclosure.

“We rented a truck and a couple of us drove to the coast and returned with the tool, and we have used it almost every day since,” Boroson said.

The unsung hero of the OLEDWorks story is Dave DeJoy who has worked to raise money non-stop since the company started.

“We have a really great group of investors who have backed us at every turn – they see the vision coming to fruition,”  said DeJoy.

With hard work, determination, innovations in materials and the precise control of multi-layer device fabrication through new manufacturing processes, they have grown OLEDWorks to a world-class solid-state lighting company with 35 employees in Rochester and 65 employees in Aachen, Germany (as a result of acquiring Philips OLED business in 2015). OLEDWorks currently has research and development, prototyping and low-volume manufacturing capabilities in Rochester, and development and high volume manufactur-ing facilities in Aachen, Germany. Their technology IP portfolio includes 30 issued US patents and 12 US Patent Applications, with a total of more than 300 patents and applica-tions worldwide.

In addition to the Brite 3 and LumiCurve Wave products, OLEDWorks manufactures cus-tom OLED taillight panels for the automotive industry. The combination of highly uniform surface emission and sharp, high contrast segmentation offers automotive manufacturers a unique option for styling and opens the door to use automotive lighting for communication between vehicles and drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, and others. OLEDWorks started shipping OLED taillight panels in 2021 to car manufacturers.

OLEDWorks was awarded the Rochester Business Journal’s Manufacturing Innovation Award in 2019 and 2020.

Dr. Hamer began his industrial career at Eastman Kodak Company in 1983, working ini-tially in chemical process development and controls, and then for a few years as a film builder for new Ektachrome and Kodachrome film products. He subsequently assumed management positions with responsibilities for commercialization of new organic chemicals, and process improvement of existing chemicals in Kodak’s internal organic imaging chemicals business.

During the last 11 years of his Kodak career, he was involved with OLED technology, with responsibilities for development and commercialization of new OLED materials. He lived in Japan for three years (2002-2005) as Senior Manager of the Technology Department at Sanyo-Kodak Display (SKD) which produced the world’s first active matrix OLED (AM-OLED) products on the world’s first AM-OLED manufacturing line.

After returning from Japan, he led Kodak teams developing technology for a manufacturable large-size TV (the basis for the system being used today by LG for OLED TVs).

Dr. Hamer left Kodak in 2010 to co-found OLEDWorks, where his responsibilities broadly included product and process development.

Dr. Boroson has 34 years of experience in product commercialization, manufacturing pro-cess and equipment development, and technology transfer. He spent five years at Rogers Corporation in Connecticut as a senior development engineer, working in the area of phenolic molding compounds and high density polyurethane foams before joining the Chemical Engineering Research Lab at Eastman Kodak in 1992.

In 1995 he moved to the OLED program at Eastman Kodak Company. He was a key mem-ber of the team that designed, developed and implemented the world’s first AM-OLED products and the AM-OLED manufacturing line that introduced novel process steps such as linear organic deposition sources, precision alignment of fine metal shadow masks, and glass to glass encapsulation.

He worked in OLED R&D and the OLED Business Unit at Eastman Kodak for 14 years as a research engineer and project manager, leading the technical team that developed of the world’s first full color AM-OLED prototype display. He also led efforts to develop novel OLED manufacturing methods in the areas of laser patterning, thin film encapsulation, high-speed flash evaporation, and low cost encapsulation. He held various roles within the OLED Business Unit until Kodak’s exit from the OLED business in late 2009 and in 2010 left Kodak and co-founded OLEDWorks.

As CTO, Dr. Boroson sets technology strategy, defines and demonstrates product architec-tures and drives process improvement through technology transfer.