Samsung is investing $38 million in a US based OLED startup called Kateeva. With Kateevas YIELDjet platform a precision deposition platform that leverages inkjet printing to mass produce flexible and large-size OLED panels. Kateeva believes that this kind of technology will be ready in 2015 to produce cheap large sized OLED-Television Kateeva reported recently that it had raised a $38 million Series D round and added Samsung Venture Investment Corporation as an investor. Kateeva, which was spun out of MIT in 2008 to make OLED displays with an ink-jet printing process, has raised $110 million to date. The money will allow Kateeva to put its technology for making flexible displays into mass production, CEO Alain Harrus said. Kateeva says it has been running pilot tests with an undisclosed company and, based on the results, says it can now scale up its equipment. Kateeva’s production method uses ink-jet printing—the same basic process as printing on paper. The ink-jet process, which has been pursued by researchers for many years, produces more uniform layers, has fewer defects, and can operate faster, president and co-founder Conor Madigan says. Later this year, the company expects to put online a machine for making flexible screens, which Madigan says is cheaper than current equipment. It will deposit the materials needed to protect the light-producing layer of an OLED device from moisture and air. Normally, manufacturers encapsulate OLED materials with layers of glass. The company can also use its ink-jet process to make the OLED pixels themselves, rather than just the encapsulation layers. It expects to start testing that equipment, which would be used to make large-format screens for TVs, within six to nine months. (Source: OledDisplay.net and xconomy.com) |