Kateeva has formally announced new YieldJet inkjet equipment that can be used for RGB pixel deposition in large area OLED manufacture. There is an Explore and an Explore Pro series. Both series perform the inkjet process in a nitrogen atmosphere, to protect the sensitive OLED materials. The Explore range is for small panels, up to 200mm square, while the Explore Pro can be used for sets up to 55″ and suitable for development and prototype volumes.
To accelerate the development process, the machines can support up to nine different inks at the same time.
The company said that the equipment is both accurate enough for 8K TV panels, and also said that mura problems are avoided by combining two proprietary technologies—ultra-fast print head monitoring and Smart Mixing software. A remote drop inspection (RDI) system measures the drop characteristics for every nozzle in the print array on a continuous basis so that the state of the print array is known at all times. The nozzle data is used to calibrate the proprietary Smart Mixing software, which determines the optimised nozzle mixing for each sub-pixel during the print.
Both series can also be used for barrier film deposition (an application that Kateeva already supports with production equipment – Man. Ed.).
Analyst Comment
Kateeva said that it has already shipped four systems from the Explore family with three more to be shipped by Q2 2018.
There is no doubt that inkjet printing would be a huge enabler of OLED as a mass market TV technology, by reducing costs, but the road to introduce the technology has been a very long one. On that basis, we’ll remain cautious until we hear of someone buying big machines for volume production, before we get over-excited. However, Kateeva is not dealing with abstracts – it is already supplying volume equipment for encapsulation, so it really understands the business and the demands of its potential customers. (BR)
Click for higher resolution. Image:Kateeva
