Better OLEDs with Human and Artificial Intelligence

As artificial intelligence (AI) revolutionizes nearly every industry, it is especially transforming consumer electronics. The technology is found in smart appliances, entertainment systems, smart security systems, wearables/fitness products, and much more. While healthcare, education, marketing, retail/ecommerce, and financial services top the list of industries aggressively adopting AI, displays are a fixture in all sectors. Especially in today’s pandemic-affected world as we live and work through the screens of our smartphones, laptops and TVs.

Not surprisingly, the display industry is integrating AI in a big way, with familiar applications getting an AI-powered boost in imaginative new ways. Take automotive, for example. In a recent achievement that exemplifies the maxim “necessity as the mother of invention”, scientists at Cambridge University joined forces with Jaguar Land Rover to develop a “no touch” touchscreen. The technique combines AI and sensors to “predict a user’s intended target on touchscreens and other interactive displays, selecting the correct item before the user’s hand reaches the display”. A well-timed invention to reduce the transmission of pathogens.

AI technology is being mainstreamed across the display ecosystem as well. In fact, for materials companies like CYNORA, AI is a foundational driver of breakthrough technologies like TADF-based emitters for OLED displays. By configuring highly selective parameters to yield extremely specific results, an AI-powered discovery engine can shrink time-to-identification of molecules that are relevant, useful, and most critically, chemically synthesizable for a target application. For display leaders, the accelerated discovery process means a faster route to test and ramp new high-performance emitter solutions for new-generation OLED displays.

But AI alone can’t get the job done. Developing breakthrough OLED emitters takes oversight by Human Intelligence (HI) as well. That means chemistry pros with extensive materials expertise and OLED device knowledge, and software experts with a vision of “what’s possible” and the skills to build the discovery engine.

This AI/HI framework guided the development of CYNORA’s materials discovery engine. Known as the Generative Exploration Model (GEM), it identifies with extreme precision the most relevant and useful molecules and related combinations from an infinite source of chemical molecules. It combines two elements: the immense computational capabilities of AI and the brainpower of CYNORA’s chemists. With AI alone there can be prediction errors and other uncertainties that diminish the output of useful data for specialized applications. By pairing AI’s computing power with the materials expertise and OLED device knowledge of our chemists, prediction errors are greatly reduced and molecules with high potential are much easier to identify.

Today, we’re enriching the GEM’s capabilities and applying its power to speed development of a TADF-based Deep Blue emitter. We believe this will be an innovation game-changer for new-generation OLEDs. While it’s the next product on our roadmap, it’s not the industry’s first commercial-grade TADF-based emitter. That milestone was reached earlier this year when we released device test kits for the cyUltimateGreen, a TADF-based Deep Green emitter.