 Hi. Hello. Please introduce yourself. Yeah, so hello. My name is Falk May. I'm working at EMD Electronics in Darmstadt in Germany, where we are developing OLED materials. So OLED is pretty awesome, right? And I interviewed the the inventor of the OLED walking around. This conference is amazing. There's just OLED all over the place. Yeah, that's right. Do you supply materials in a lot of OLED in the world? That's right, exactly. Yeah. So you can see a picture of an OLED over here. So yeah, typically the whole stack of course consists of many layers, but the one that we are most interested in is the OLED active stack that you can see here in the display. And it consists of green, red, and blue pixels. And actually you can see some of the pixels in that black box here. There's a red, green, and a blue pixel, which contain also MAC materials. So what goes into making these materials? Is it stuff you've learned over the years? Yeah, exactly. So our approach is actually to use our knowledge from the past, but also we try to develop new materials using, for example, computer simulations. That's also my expertise and my background. We try to understand the materials before we synthesize them. We try to model them on the computer and get the best out of the materials. Yeah, sure. Some of the interesting OLEDs I've been filming here, for example, are printed. That's right. Are you supplying for them? Yes. Is it different or similar? Yeah. So the material properties for printed OLED or evaporated OLED are actually quite different. And yeah, the reason for that is that the film morphology is very different from solution process as compared to evaporated. So also the materials need to have different properties, whether you want to solution process them or whether you want to evaporate them. That's right. And when you run your computer software, does it have an AI? Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, we're also looking into machine learning and AI stuff. But so for OLED, it's actually not so easy because you need a lot of data to make AI really powerful. And OLED is a quite new research field compared to other display technologies. So there is what's called all these layers here. And it looks like a lot of layers all over the place. Every layer. Yeah, you can have a look here. Maybe it's better to see over here. So this is how one of the OLED pixels that you saw in the black box actually is composed of of many layers. So for example, the holes are injected here from the whole injection layer. They are transported. They can be blocked. Here's the emissive layer with the emitters. So red, green and blue pixels are in the emissive layer. And then we have a hole blocking layer, electron transporting layer and electron injection layer. And actually, so mag materials are in all of those layers. And depending on what kind of function you want for the material, also the chemical structure is very different. How about the they talk about masks and getting rid of masks and yeah, so that's how people are using. Where's the mask? So in our process, we don't need this fine metal mask. That's the question for the panel maker in the end. So we just supply the materials. So actually, the mask is not something that we really get into contact with. So it doesn't matter if they use mask or they don't use mask, they'll use materials anyway. Exactly. Yeah. And when I go around here and we film with these companies over there, there's amazing flexible OLEDs. Yeah, right. What you need to think about to make a flexible OLED. Okay. Is it just the same stuff as before? Yeah. Just with a different cover, the plastic instead of glass. And there's actually also glass. So you can also do it with glass. It just has to be very thin. So and also the OLED layers have to be very thin. But that's that's not a problem. So we can make layers as thin as five nanometers. So really thin OLEDs are possible. Why is it burning sometimes? Yeah. Is it to do with problem with the purity in the material or nothing to do with that? No, it's not the purity. So I mean, there are degradation processes going on. And also in the conference, there have been some talks about this degradation issues that could be, for example, due to exciton-polar on interactions or stuff like that. So that's something that we also take into consideration. And we can material side as well. So organic. It's like alive. Does I mean this stuff is living? No. What is the organic? Yeah. It means there's a lot of carbon in there. So there's maybe a little bit of oxygen, nitrogen. So these are the most important elements. Yeah. And that's why it's called organic. It's not living. It's not alive. But it's that this carbon stuff can't degrade potentially. Yes. That's right. Yeah. But that just means that, for example, of a molecule, a funnel ring is breaking off, for example. But that funnel ring will then still stay in the OLED. So it's not coming out of the OLED. And so when you run those computer softwares and look for materials and everything, you basically have a database of all known materials. And you combine them this way, that way, make new materials and suddenly you find something? Yeah. So it's kind of an interplay between the computer simulation but also the chemists in our labs. They have their own ideas and they think about new molecules. And then before they go to the lab to synthesize them, we can look at the properties of these materials on the computer and decide whether it's worth to go for the synthesis. Because some of the materials we are creating, they take several synthesis steps. And this is very time consuming and also very expensive to synthesize them. Is it pretty awesome when you find a solution, you try it out and it just works? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So there are these moments where in the computer simulation you try to predict something and then this material really is synthesized and it's tested in a real device and it performs the way that you predicted. It's really nice. But there's also kind of drawbacks where you predict something and actually it turns out to be wrong. So then you have to modify your models. Yeah. And when you talk LCD, you also, all of the LCDs, right? Right, exactly. What do we see here in the wall? Yeah. I see the backlight, polarizer, TFT. So this is the layer where the LCDs are in, exactly. Yeah. And when I see all these layers, you are in all of them? No, no, no, no. Some of them. Yeah, some of them. Yeah. Right. Yeah. All right. So here, there's something else. So what is it? Yeah. So this is some of the only materials. So these are actually polymers. So nowadays in most displays, there's actually no polymers in because most of the materials are just evaporated. So that means that they have small molecules inside. And here polymer is a very long chain of organic material. But these were one of the first yellow appearing materials that were synthesized as polymers and they can be solution-processed. And here at the display week, do you have conversations with customers, partners, startups, innovators? Exactly, yeah. And what kind of conversations do you have, like, very technical? They ask you a bunch of stuff? Yeah. So we have technical discussions with our customers, like for example, the panel vendors. But we also have discussions here with academic partners from universities, for example, or from small startups. Yeah. That's actually the day is very full with meetings and discussions. So, yeah, very interesting. So it's cool to work in a company where you know you're in a crucial part of the world, the technology world, right? Yeah. The display is so important. But I mean, at Merck, you're also doing a whole bunch of other stuff, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. And there's very different stuff at Merck. For example, healthcare, I mean, developing, for example, some pharmaceuticals is very different. It was very exciting. But of course, I don't have much contact now with the people developing, I don't know, some medical stuff about cancer, curing cancer. So it's very different. But it's of course exciting to be in such a company. Thanks very much to ZXS to be one of my sponsors here at the display week 2023. ZXS is based in Shenzhen and I will be doing a video very soon with them featuring their transparent displays OLED LCD light box ads machine. So thanks a lot. I did video with them nearly 10 years ago when they were doing tablets. And now they do these cool devices. Thanks a lot for watching. Check them out.