 So we're here at Nova Centrics and who are you? Hi, I'm Stan Farnsworth. I head up marketing and sales at Nova Centrics and I'm one of the founding employees some years ago. We're here at ID Tech X event, Print Electronics Europe in Berlin in 2016. And what we've got at our exhibition area today is a few examples of our Pulseforge Fritonic Caring tools. And this particular tool, the Pulseforge 1200, has been on the market for about two years now. We've seen a lot of adoption and a number of applications and it's been very exciting from a technology developmental perspective. But one of the pieces we're really showing here at this particular event are some of the accessories now that we've developed that help to enable even more development and more progress and more innovation and more technology on behalf of our customers. And so this particular piece, this is called the EX1 controlled environment shock. For Fritonic Caring, one of the key topics is getting a good thermal coupling between the substrate that's being processed, the materials that are being processed and the processing base. And so what we've done here is developed a porous graphite vacuum surface, vacuum check to hold down the material and get a very good thermal conduction so we can process a much wider range of materials. So on the key pieces on the side here, we have the vacuum feeds. We can also use compressed air and other gases as part of the system. And then something goes on there? Right, so the material to be processed would sit from an R&D perspective just right on the processing square here. One of the key pieces of this though is not just the vacuum check, but this is also an accessory that has the ability to heat or cool the material so we can heat the substrate to a pre-arranged temperature or we can apply cooling and get the substrate to a controlled lower temperature that really expands the process window for processing and getting optimal performance from the material. And how this is used, this is shaped the way it is because as we use it, we'll come over here to the sample drawer, put this on here and we'll lower the stage down, we'll take off some of these accessories. So what we're doing here is we're taking advantage of the fact that the processing stage here was designed to be lowered to accommodate exactly this kind of test fixture. So we'll open this up and we can take this and it just sits very neatly on top of the stage. So now we can close the drawer, connect our couplings and process the material. So this fits right on top of the existing tool. So customers that already have one of these can use this and this really expands the processing capability for a number of samples. Applications where this is especially critical, we've seen this really enable opportunities in displays, in particular OLEDs and even some variants of more traditional LED technologies around allowing the photonic hearing process and the pulse forge tools to process a variety of the OLED or LED materials as part of that complex material stack but without damaging some of the more sensitive materials that companies are starting to use in those systems. So what kind of OLEDs are the people able to do with your products? Sure, so different kinds of lighting or displays. Really it's the displays that's been a key interest for this kind of technology. As that community, the OLED community, the display community is really going through sort of this hyper competition right now where we're seeing in the press they're really being aggressive and rolling out active matrix OLEDs and some of these other new technologies and companies are looking for any kind of technology edge that they can get either to bring the cost down, to make the OLED performance higher, brighter, durability. Also cost is always an issue for production. Is this for flexible OLEDs? Yeah, of course, absolutely flexible OLEDs, right. This is printed electronics? Yeah, sure, yeah printed electronics. Now the OLED itself might be in a rigid display but some of the key technologies that are being adapted for that are moving towards being able to flex and curve. With plastics? Yeah, with plastics, also with flexible glass. Right, flexible glass is a key material as well. Flexible glass, so all these awesome things are being possible with Nova Centrics. Right, so we're involved in a lot of them, not in all of them for sure but as companies like to really expand the technology capabilities we're finding that they're really interested and able to use this kind of advancement to give them more options in the materials that they use. So since those years when you were part of the founding team of the Nova Centrics there's a lot of stuff happening in this industry. Well it's a huge amount and this is an example. Wearables is a big topic right now. This is an example of just a concept device that was made with the group in Spain, the Uracat Group. We've been collaborating with them for a little while now, I encourage you. They have a video on YouTube actually, if you do a search for Uracat that you'll see how this shirt was manufactured. So there's a whole design process. Yeah, it's a Simon Says shirt so you can turn it on and play and do patterns with it. As we think about other kinds, in fact here's the video that's running so they're screen printing different layers of the shirt and testing of the electronics to make sure that they're still getting functional. This is the future of smart closing, this is a taste of how the future of smart closing can happen. Absolutely, this is such a hot topic right now. The ability to take garments, textiles and integrate some kind of functionality to it. Now there's a whole emerging industry space around, is that technology around fitness? Is it around style and design? All of that is happening right now as we speak. Right. So also happening right now. So we'll check out, but you can directly answer the question right now. It's a large roll-to-roll system that we've been implementing. All right, so we'll show it off right here. Yeah, you're welcome. If you need anything else, as well as a very popular demo to show off your big machines. What we've done here is take that exact same pulse-forged 1200 photonic carrying technology, that exact same equipment, put it into a different chassis structure, integrate it with a very simple roll-to-roll handling system in an R&D stage, and this helps companies and institutions and groups take the next step from moving with small sheets to rolls of material to understand the developmental challenges that they can be faced with with moving to this kind of larger volume format. So two of the most awesome things I've seen at the show is flexible OLED displays, flexible processors. So you will be involved in those? We are involved in some of those, right. There are a lot of different technology cells happening in the community right now. What we're starting to see is that companies that have been focused on flexible processors, companies that have been focused on very specific OLED light and display generation technologies, companies like us that have been working on conductive inks and processing equipment, all of these competencies now are starting to converge. And that's part of the benefit of coming to events like this, is it allows us to network and build relationships with these other groups so that otherwise we're working in our areas maybe a little bit separately, but we can come together and take all of our expertise and really allow us to deliver something that from a customer perspective is much more interesting. So we can do these kinds of rolls of material. And this goes from a collection of competencies from Nova Centrics. In this case we're using a flexi-graphic system from Harper, which is a terrific company and they've been great to work with on the deposition side. We're using a near IR system from AdFos, which has also been great to work with nearby. But it's this kind of collaboration that really is propelling and driving the space forward so that we can build technology solutions for the end users to be able to add value and build market with their customers. So let's say the flexible smart closing, smart display, smart electronics, flexible everything, but if that's the future, are you part of the R&D and also of the mass production? That's correct. Are you making the fab of the future? Right, so we have production variations of this equipment in factories right now throughout Asia, some in the US as well, and that's really driving and enabling some of these new products. We're still at the early stage of that, so if we think of an adoption S-curve, the space and also Nova Centrics are at the early stages of that adoption S. Now fortunately from a technology perspective, a lot of the component and constituent technologies are pretty well developed. So this equipment in and of itself is very highly developed. The components and the equipment and the materials around this room from the other companies are also very highly developed. But as I said, they're coming together to enable new products from our customers and that's what we like to show here is that capability. You've been involved mostly in the R&D kind of phase and then you will be part of even more now of the mass production future. Right, so most of our customers are R&D customers, but I can say that most of the equipment that we ship now is for production uses. So when we think of a percentage, the very high percentage of the customers are still in the R&D stage and that's because they're at an institute or university or a corporate R&D center. We have had some customers move all the way through this product development process and move into full volume production. People have objects in their houses or they own objects somehow through their, around them that were made and enabled by these pulse forage tools, otherwise they would not even be possible. And that's exciting for us to see is these technologies are absolutely being adopted, inks are being used and it's really validating that there is a role for these in the consumer community. So if there's going to be those 20 billion IoT devices and wearables and everything, you could be a big part of making that happen. Oh absolutely, sure. Yeah, we're very involved in that whole space and helping to enable that. There's a lot of innovation happening there and a lot of creativity on the application side. You know, we think about innovation, we think about delivering products, but before all of that comes creativity and inspiration. And so throughout all aspects of this technology chain from companies like Novacentrix, building materials and equipment, all the way through to the companies that are developing the actual IoT devices, we're seeing creativity, we're seeing innovation and we're starting to see an increase in delivering products. And future requests from your customers to get new functions, new features, new stuff? Yeah, it's evolving every day. Customers are trying to figure out what they want. So it's a collaborative discussion. That discussion hinges on our ability to effectively communicate to customers what the capabilities are and some of our experiences and some ideas from our applications engineering team. But a lot of that also comes from the customers getting more familiarity with what the technology capabilities are, such as from companies like us, but then also what market opportunities and market interests are. That's driving requirements. And then on the very far end, it's the consumers who are starting to understand what they want and like and these kinds of products. So it's actually quite complicated because along this entire span from the end customer back through the different stages of product manufacturing and development to companies like us, the requirements and what the markets need are shifting. So it's really important to be listening, to be in strong communication throughout this technology chain and then also to be able to adapt and respond quickly to changes and to an increased awareness of what the opportunities really are as everything is shifting.