Jan Blochwitz-Nimoth

Using Lanthanide intermetallic emitters and their perfect blue emission characteristics for OLED has long been an unattainable dream. The primary challenge has been achieving air-stability of these emitters without shifting their emission color from blue to green or even red and ensuring their ability to undergo vacuum sublimation, required for OLED mass production.

At beeOLED, we have developed breakthrough technologies that enable the use of Lanthanide-metal-ions for blue in OLEDs. Thanks to the inherent, long-term stability of inorganic materials, this new class of metal organic emitters offers the potential to achieve deep blue emission with 100% internal efficiency while simultaneously ensuring the longest OLED lifetime.

We will outline our approach and demonstrate our rapid progress. These materials can be vacuum-sublimed and achieve external quantum efficiencies exceeding 20% when used in advanced deep blue OLEDs. We will present data showing their outstanding stability. Our recent advancements will enable beeOLED® material sampling to key customers within a year.

Why is this important? The OLED display industry has long sought an advanced blue emission layer that matches the efficiency and lifetime of the other two primary colors green and red. Existing approaches, such as phosphorescent (triplet emission) and TADF emitters, face inherent material stability limitations. beeOLED® blue technology would significantly enhance display efficiency, extend mobile device battery life, and revolutionize OLED panel manufacturing - especially for IT and TV applications. By using only blue OLEDs and employing color conversion for the other primary colors, production processes could become significantly more efficient and scalable.

In this talk, we will also present a market-based analysis of the potential customer benefits of this innovation, drawing from available data (including insights from Counterpoint) and well-founded estimates. From this, we will introduce a concept we call ‘affordable cost,’ which translates the customer value of advanced blue OLED solutions into a feasible cost-per-gram for materials.

Jan Blochwitz-Nimoth was born near Dresden, Germany, in 1970. He studied Physics at TU Dresden and the University of Oldenburg, completing his diploma thesis at TU Dresden’s Institute for Applied Photo Physics (IAPP) in the area of ultra-short laser spectroscopy. Early in his career, he worked on inorganic optoelectronics and light projection devices.

In the late 1990s, Jan conducted pioneering research on doped charge transport layers for OLEDs, earning his PhD from TU Dresden in 2001. This work contributed to the founding of Novaled, where he served as co-Founder and long-time Technical and Intellectual Property Manager. Since 2013, Novaled has been a subsidiary of Samsung, and its doping technology is now used in almost all OLED display products worldwide. From 2017 to 2020, Jan worked as a business consultant and angel investor. Between 2020 and 2022, he was Founder and Financial Managing Director at Arioso Systems, a Fraunhofer spin-off developing innovative SiMEMS Speaker technology for in-ear headphones. He managed the successful sale of Arioso Systems to Bosch Sensortec in 2022.

In late 2022, Jan became the CEO of beeOLED, a deep-tech startup focused on solving the final challenge in OLED display technology: creating a high-efficiency, long-lasting blue emitter.