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17 Jun 2002
Opsys began life as a developer of small-molecule organic light-emitting diodes. Now the company is manufacturing these products and is also investigating polymer materials. Nadya Anscombe visits Opsys to find out more about its plans for the future.
From Opto & Laser Europe July/August 2001
A year ago, not many people had heard of Opsys. The young start-up company - based in Oxford, UK - was quietly developing its organic light-emitting-diode technology while its competitors were busy making optimistic predictions and frequently unrealistic promises about products.
Now Opsys is ready to shout about its technology and plans for the future. The company has been expanding rapidly, and recently made several announcements about new funding, an important licensing agreement and the expansion of its production capacity.
Opsys currently develops three types of materials: red, green and blue fluorescent small
molecules (organic and organometallic); phosphorescent molecules, including transition metal and
lanthanide organometallic phosphors; and macromolecular materials, such as dendrimers.
All of the Kodak materials fall into the first category, but Michael Holmes, CEO of Opsys,
told OLE: "We are developing other fluorescent small molecules that improve on the
performance of the current generation of Kodak materials in terms of stability, efficiency and
chromaticity."
Although Kodak has many licensees for its OLED technology, Opsys is the only one in
Europe, and Holmes is confident that this will remain the case for some time.
However, Opsys does not plan to make its displays in Europe - it has set up a
manufacturing site in Fremont, US. The reason is simple, according to Holmes: Opsys cannot find
the right staff in Europe. "In the UK we can get the best chemists, optoelectronics engineers and
physicists in the world, but we simply cannot find process technologists with experience in the
nanoscale production environment. In the US we put one advert in the San Jose Mercury
News, and within a few days we had received 150 high-quality applications."
By late 2002, Opsys plans to be making 1 to 5 inch diagonal passive-matrix displays and
backlights for portable devices using a combination of Kodak's technology and its own OLED
developments. The company has developed green and blue backlights and is working on other
colours.
"Manufacturing on a small-to-medium scale will be profitable on its own," said Holmes.
And once Opsys has shown that its displays are reliable and easily manufactured, it plans to go to
the larger display manufacturers and sell licences. First, however, the company has to develop a
suitable mass-production process.
"For our technology to be taken up, it has to be compatible with the manufacturing methods
that firms are currently putting in place. We have two product strategies: to develop a product that
is constrained by today's manufacturing technologies and, in the long-term, develop new
manufacturing processes," said Holmes.
Small-molecule OLED-manufacturing technologies are currently based on batch
evaporation techniques, which involve several steps and do not readily enable the size of the
substrate to be changed.
Holmes said: "In the long term, we believe that solution-based processes, such as those
used by firms developing polymer-based OLEDs, are the way forward." These continuous
processes include ink-jet printing, web coating and spin coating. Opsys is therefore developing
light-emitting polymers and dendrimers as part of its long-term strategy.
Companies involved in OLEDs usually commit themselves to either small-molecule or
polymer OLEDs, with fierce competition between the two camps. Opsys has traditionally been
known for small-molecule work, and some might see its involvement in polymer research as a
contradiction.
However, Holmes believes that the argument should be about which manufacturing
technique is used, rather than which kind of material. "We think systems that can be solution
processed give long-term advantages in terms of production cost, but that evaporation systems are
currently more developed. So we're running with both, with different time-scales on each."
One of Opsys's main competitors, Cambridge Display Technologies (CDT), owns patents
covering devices made from conjugated polymers. These patents are so basic that most firms
wanting to develop polymer-based OLEDs need to take out a licence from CDT. But Holmes is
adamant that "the novel classes of polymers we have in development are not subject to the CDT
patents".
Opsys can be confident of this, because two of its senior members of staff have worked
closely with CDT in the past. Don Barclay, Opsys's advanced research manager, is a former
consultant for CDT; and Paul Burn, an Opsys research team leader, was working on conjugated
polymers at Cambridge University at around the same time that CDT was established.
This strategy has been very successful for the firm, says Holmes, because of the way in
which these research groups have been led: "The return you get on an academic programme is
entirely dependent on the academic leading that programme."
Opsys sponsors 15 researchers, and currently has 25 employees at its headquarters. This
figure is set to grow in the forthcoming months, as recruitment drives take place in both the UK
and in the US.
Such growth has been encouraged by the increasing acceptance of OLED technology in the
displays market. This has been driven by Opsys's competitors, many of whom had never heard of
Opsys - until now.
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