 So we're here at the SID display week here at the iZone and hi so who are you? Hi I'm Marta, I'm the PR for the XTPL company and we are very happy that we won an honorary award at the iZone and we introduce you to Philip Granek the inventor of our technology for printing ultra-precise like conductive lines. So hi! Hello hi I'm Philip with XTPL, really happy about being here in Los Angeles and maybe I can explain you what XTPL does. XTPL provides a technology for printing extremely fine structures using nanomaterials. We have developed a special unit for printing it's called the printing head XTPL printing head it's a uniquely designed printing unit and electrical controls that control the position of the ink. We like to say that this control of the position of the ink is like playing music to nanoparticles we play the music they start to dance and by dancing they form very very fine structures that are impossible to be printed with standard printing technologies like screen printing, inkjet printing so it gives you a lot of value when you go to very fine structures for manufacturing of parts of displays or various types of printed electronic devices. Because this looks like it's very small what are you talking about? This is let's say about 100 times more thinner than the human hair so that's about half micrometer and what do you show this here are you printing that small? Yeah we're printing that small and that's that's the whole thing here that you can be printing in additive manufacturing even at the sub micrometer resolution so you can go below single micrometer ideally we print a few micron lines but you can go even to below 100 nanometers potentially and this is not possible with any other existing printing method in the world. Where you show this flexible display here is it something to do with that? Yeah so we can print structures also on flexible substrates so our structures that we print can be also flexible and like I said this can work on glass on foils and you can print various materials metallic conductive structures but also quantum dots and semiconductor materials at very high resolution. So what do you talk about the dance? What does that mean? It doesn't mean there's some kind of swing happening? Yeah so I don't know if this this is probably could be helpful so you see the ink here it's a wet droplet of the ink with individual nanoparticles inside the small dots and then we make them move together to make a very narrow narrow structure because the electrical field forces them to move like this and the control of the electric field is what I call this music that makes the nanoparticles move and this move is like I said can be called a dance within the liquid surface and then afterwards we dry the liquid and the solid structure stays on the surface and it can be used as electrical connector or whatever purpose you want it to be used for. So right here what is this that's showing here that's isn't an example what would be printed? Oh this is actually a structure that is better seen with the microscope but there are very tiny wires between these electrical pads and some of the wires are broken and we are repairing them we're healing this broken structure by applying our additive manufacturing and it's like a good example of our application for open defect repair if you have like a bat pixel and not working pixel in your display before you ship it to your customers you want to repair this pixel by healing some of these broken lines. So this is like a repairing machine it's like one of the let's say application fields is to do repairs obviously we are hungry for other applications as well but it's a good application where our company can already provide value today. Can you fix dead pixels? We can fix some classes of dead pixels some classes of defects data for OLED for LCDs and the particular class is called open defects where you have a line that is broken that is not electrically conductive anymore so you come with a small metallic patch you close the line it's electrically conductive again it's very fine and it activates the pixel again. So maybe we can sit back down so what did you win the prize right here at the iZone like why is this so important? Well I think the the application of additive manufacturing of printing technologies at this very fine resolution can be potentially interested interesting not just for the defect repair in the displays but also to deposit other classes of materials like quantum dots for light emission at very high precision and we hope and we had a lot of discussions with potential partners these days that this would be a growing business for us. But the way that quantum dot displays are going to be made right they're going to be made like in huge fabs that just print the huge things right so where's your space in that market because you're just making small things right? We're making small things and today we're making them with a single printing unit so we are in the process of scaling the printing unit so you will have multiple printing heads joined together so then you can print faster on the large surfaces and this way you know that we will get the transition to work on larger surfaces and today more industrial applications where speed and throughput is of essence. So you would print large surfaces of what like the whole display? You know elements of display depending if this should be you know parts of electrical circuitry part of electrical conductive structures are very fine or depositing light and meeting quantum dots locally so this is you know where we have just initial discussions here hopefully some of them will convert to projects. So you kind of discussions with what kind of companies? Equipment manufacturers that will work on supplying you know final equipment to display industry they would be interested in integrating our printing unit in their machines and then the end users being the touch screen manufacturers and the display manufacturers who are just interested to understand you know how our technology can fit into their technology roadmaps and how we could think of potential future developments not for this particular generation of the product but maybe for N plus and two future generations where this technology can play a role. So what's your background where you based? We're in Europe actually in Poland in a city called Wroclaw a really interesting place with a lot of universities so we have a lot of well educated people there our labs are filled with smart people in you know coming from chemistry background mechanical engineering electrical engineering physics even mathematics and you know software expert so it's a good mixture of people that we can get there we don't have to compete against you know companies like companies in Silicon Valley so we have you know maybe easier access to talents there but we are also establishing a footprint now in Bay Area because of the potential customer base is not really in Poland for us it's rather US and Asian markets that are interesting for us so we'll be present here as well. And how many people? We are now 35 people back in Poland and establishing a small group here in US as well. What's the roles of all these people? Well they work like on electrical systems here to you know to design the electrical circuitry to design the software that drives the head the mechanical part so the mechanical components the chemistry of the inks so the particular inks that are being used to print nanomaterials this is the chemist that work on that and these are these are the examples of silver inks that can help us print the electrically conductive structures like silver inks but we do also work on other metallic structures that can be printed we like to show that our printing head comes with some starting kits of materials that you can start printing right away but if people are interested in you know using their own inks we are also open for that and try to help them optimize their inks for this particular printing unit. Is this like a prototype or is this already fully working? Yes so for the defect repair so the initial niche that we are aiming at display manufacturing this is a working working solution and we are now in process of integrating that in the tools of equipment manufacturers who are at the end of the day supplying equipment to the module manufacturers the display modules so that's two modules. Because one of the problems with the display industry is this yield problem and then there's so many displays that just get thrown in the trash. Yeah I think I mean as you're pushing the limits of resolution and getting finer and finer pitch sizes automatically some of the structures will have defects and some of the defects makes it makes sense to to repair them and you know if you have a tool that can improve your yield a little bit and this is where we can come into play and make people help you. Would there be some kind of system with cameras that can detect where the thing could be going in and repairing? So we think there are already pretty good systems for defect detection and defect qualification out there we don't want to go there we want to be the guys who you know after the defect is classified and detected we are the ones to repair it right? So maybe radiant the camera from radiant of one of those and they they identify and then you go and fix it maybe. Yeah so so I usually I would expect this is like a two-step process first you look for the defects you classify them and then some defects can be repaired with this method some defect can be repaired with that method some defects cannot be repaired so you need to discard the the whole module probably so and we would be one of the repair methods that is good for open defect repair not for the short circuits if you have a short circuit defect and it's really good to use lasers just to apply the defect our technology would not bring you know advantage there but for the open defect having the possibility to deposit the very fine structures in a fast and easy way this is I think where the processing time and the costs of such a repair is of advantage in our case