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OTI Lumionics Enabling OLED Lighting
October 22, 2018


OTI Lumionics, founded in 2011 by Mr. Helander and three co-founders, Zhibin Wang, Jacky Qiu, and Zhenghong Lu, is currently working with large consumer electronics manufacturers in Asia toward that goal. Mr. Helander says he is unable to name his company’s partners due to the secretive nature of the industry, but he expects that to change within the next 18 to 24 months. OTI Lumionics, which has 30 employees, received $5.7-million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada in 2015 to develop a production facility capable of making high volumes of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels. With that facility up and running, the key to the next era of product and manufacturing design will be speeding up materials research and production, Mr. Helander says. Traditionally, that process takes years because it requires many different materials to be physically tested. Hardware advances are therefore considerably slower than software development, which can move at lightning speed.
OTI Lumionics is instead using artificial intelligence to simulate much of its testing, which eliminates dead ends more quickly. The company can then physically test materials that win out in simulations in its production facility. “We can filter down a lot of candidates that will probably fail and focus on just a few that have a very high probability of success,” Mr. Helander says. “Even large chemical companies don’t have that capability internally and we’ve found that to be a unique advantage. It helps us get a better understanding of how the materials will perform in a mass production environment for a flexible display, for example.”