Enabling OLED printing...

TJet Technologies, Inc. is developing the next generation manufacturing equipment that will allow the emerging organic light emitting diode (OLED) display to compete with and ultimately replace the liquid crystal display (LCD).  As compared with LCD, OLED displays have superior viewing angle, contrast ratio, color saturation, brightness, power efficiency, and pixel response time. If OLED displays can become cost competitive with LCDs (or even cheaper!), OLED will become the dominant display technology.  However, the equipment and process technology does not yet exist to support large volume, low cost manufacturing.

Building upon a revolutionary printhead concept developed at MIT by the company co-founders, the TJet approach overcomes the problems inherent in other OLED printing technologies (such as inkjet and laser transfer) and enables the printing of OLED displays having high power effiencies and long lifetimes.  By leveraging the intrinsic low-cost and large area scalability of printing, TJet OLED tools and process technology will allow display makers the manufacture OLED displays at substantially lower cost than LCDs.

Company History

TJet was incorporated in October 2007 while the five MIT co-founders, Dr. Conor Madigan, Dr. Valerie Leblanc, Dr. Gerry Chen, Prof. Vladimir Bulovic, and Prof. Martin Schmidt, were still in Massachusetts.  The team then decided to locate the company to California’s Silicon Valley and begin seeking venture capital investment.  In December 2007, TJet brought on board as the final co-founder Silicon Valley semiconductor equipment legend Dr. Sass Somekh, former President of Novellus and former Exec. VP of Applied Materials.

In March 2008, TJet finalized terms for a Series A round of investment.  The two venture capital firms, Sigma Partners and Spark Capital, co-led the round.  In addition, Varian Semiconductor Associates participated with a small strategic investment.

In April 2008, TJet established its first office within the Silicon Valley offices of Sigma Partners.  In June 2008, already utilizing a staff of 6 full time employees and contractors and having out-grown their temporary space, TJet relocated to 1430 OBrien Drive in the Menlo Business Park.