Chemistry With a Commercial Mindset
Mar 7, 2022
5 min read
SmartKem’s Chief Scientist talks about scaling materials, organic semiconductors and quantum dots.
Written by Laura Beeston
Illustrations by Allan Matias
Dr. Beverley Brown is the ultimate pro in Printable Electronics. Working in the field since its inception more than 20 years ago, she is among the world’s leading experts in organic semiconductor technology—the chemistry that drives display technology.
With an extensive career as a materials scientist, Dr. Brown’s experience includes a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from Glasgow University, 18 years at Imperial Chemical Industries’ New Science Research Group, and time spent at Zeneca and the National Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) before joining SmartKem in 2014.
In organic electronics since 1999, the Chief Scientist says she’s seen huge improvements in material performance.
“The key challenge [today] is getting industry uptake of the material sets that we have developed.”
Dr. Brown and her team works on the chemistry that powers Organic Thin-Film Transistors (OTFTs), miniLEDs (that measure around 0.1 millimeter) and helped develop Full Array Local Dimming (FALD) processes, which locally control LED light levels in a segmented backlight unit to enhance contrast in images.
SmartKem currently has an impressive 16 patent families, 122 patents granted and 30 patents pending, plus an extensive company trade secret library.
While most of us are familiar with the bright, colorful pixels when looking at the liquid crystal display on your TV or laptop, they can’t glow and produce fantastic colors without the right electronics to drive them.
As per Dr. Brown,“the sexy part of it is the color rendition.”
Located at the very back of the display, you’ll find her work and SmartKem’s organic chemicals manufactured into tens of thousands of micron-sized, organic field effect transistors driving the red, green and blue pixels that generate the images.
“Whether it’s an OLED display [or] an LCD display, they all require transistor backplanes to generate the image,” Dr. Brown explains. “Without these unseen ‘back room’ inventions, you would not get the really high resolution, high contrast images at the front of the display.”
Local, dimming back lights makes the image for the end user absolutely fantastic, she adds. “Much better color brightness, a very high contrast ratio, [which] means that very old technology like liquid-crystal display (LCD) gets a new lease of life, [and able] to compete with the more expensive OLED TVs.”
Developing the active organic semiconductor component and all of the accompanying passive interlayer chemistry, SmartKem has invented an extremely stable organic electronics technology platform.
“We sell six inks and those inks are used to make the whole transistor backplane,” says Dr. Brown. “What we're about is making inks that are formulated ready to use that you can use in an ambient environment so they don't need to be very carefully protected during the industrial scale manufacturing processes.”
“[It’s something] display makers can use on their lines with minimal capital investment.”
Marrying semiconductors and quantum dots
While initially organic transistors may find use in LCD or electrophoretic displays (Amazon Kindle), Dr. Brown notices this science is gaining traction for applications like fingerprint recognition and biosensors.
“This is huge,” she says, “I think we will see the technology migrating into sensing applications and security applications . . . the conformability of plastic electronics is just waiting to happen . . .”
“I think the short-term applications sit in the field of displays.”
Surely, the journey to enhancing future onscreen experiences through display and with MicroLED and NanoLED products will be realized through industry collaboration.
This is why SmartKem, with its organic semiconductor platform, makes an ideal partner for the quantum dot pioneers at Nanosys—the pair announced a joint development agreement in February, 2022.
The plan is to build a new generation of low-cost solution printed microLED and quantum dot materials for advanced displays.
In the deal, Dr. Brown’s role will be in the invention of organic chemistry, which suits her just fine.
“I like the chemistry, way, way in the back of the device,” she says, explaining that the first step and short-term output for the partnership will be building a full display prototype.
Using SmartKem’s backplane transistors with microLEDs, and quantum dot enhancement tech from Nanosys, the end product will be a high brightness, high contrast, high color gamut display that competes with OLED displays.
In the longer term, additive printing techniques will be evaluated to deliver all-printed displays where both the organic transistors and the electroluminescent quantum dots can be deposited at low temperature directly onto the substrate of choice.
The goal for this partnership is to get to a fully solution printed display—printing every layer, including transistors and all the electronics—which would be truly disruptive to the industry.
Inventing for the long game
While this dive into advanced chemistry may appear daunting to those awaiting the next best thing in display technology, Dr. Brown seems energized by the work cut out for her and her team over the next few months.
In her experience, one of the great challenges and rewards of being a scientist is that “there is no shortage of technical problems to be addressed.”
“I would say that 80% of the time, you're in the valley of despair [where things don’t work],” she admits with a smile. “It's 80% [a] valley of despair and 20% euphoria.”
Dr. Brown recalls that it took nearly 20 years for amorphous silicon and indium gallium zinc oxide to get fully optimized in production.
So she keeps her sights to the horizon.
Today, she says, SmartKem is about creating inks that are formulated and ready to use in an ambient environment, “so they don't need to be very carefully protected from atmospheric pollutants, [and so] display makers can use them on their lines with minimal capital investment.”
Tomorrow—with SmartKem’s OTFT backplanes enabling the manufacture of microLED or nanoLED displays using Nanosys’ quantum dot technologies—the future of displays is not only bright, but low power, cost-efficient, robust, flexible and lightweight.
“I'm very excited about the collaboration,” says Dr. Brown. “There's a great overlap in both parties' chemistry. And I think we're going to make really nice products.”