Originally published in the 2015 issue of Impact Magazine.
Google “OLED,” and you’ll find scores of articles confidently predicting that this is the year of the organic light-emitting diode. Some of those articles are ten years old. Still, there are reasons to believe the OLED age is finally dawning. In fact, engineering alumnus Michael Helander (EngSci 0T7, MSE PhD 1T2) is betting on it.
Three years ago, he was a PhD student with an important discovery just published in Science—a rising star who could have had his pick of academic postings. Instead, he gave up a life in research to start a technology company he named OTI Lumionics. The failure rate of technology startups, by some estimates, is 90 per cent.
Who would trade the life they’d dreamed of for a chance to play Russian roulette with five chambers loaded? Someone who’s counting on a lot more than just luck.
Why the fuss about OLEDs? And what on earth is an OLED? The best answer to both questions is OTI’s first and only consumer product, the aerelight. It’s an aluminum table lamp—sleek, angled, and a little retro (reminiscent of an older Canadian beauty, 1968’s Contempra phone). The light comes from a 10-cm square wafer no thicker than two sheets of paper—an OLED.
Not only is the lamp beautiful, so is its light. OLEDs are cool to the touch but warm to the eye, dimmable, flexible and efficient. They don’t blaze from a single spot like an LED; they diffuse evenly from every point on their surfaces, which can be arbitrarily large. After seeing the aerelight, other light sources—whether incandescent, fluorescent, or LED—immediately seem huge, hot and obsolete.
Like a conventional light-emitting diode, an organic LED produces light when a voltage is placed across it. The difference is the material between the electrodes. Instead of a crystalline semiconductor, OLEDs use organic compounds—plastics, in essence—similar to the pigments used in colour Xerox machines.
“LEDs are grown from perfect single crystals,” says Helander. “The probability of a defect increases exponentially with size, so it’s limited to a point source. Organic molecules don’t have any long-range order, so they don’t need a perfect single-crystal structure to work. That’s what allows you to distribute it across a large surface.”
Lighting isn’t the only place the OLED shines. It’s already made an appearance in smartphone displays and television screens, where its other advantages—richer colours, deeper blacks and near-instantaneous response times—make it the heir apparent to the liquid crystal display. But OTI is staying away from displays. Multinationals like Samsung and LG have already spent billions to enter and fight over that market.
Lighting, on the other hand, is still in its dark ages. Even the latest technology, the LED, comes packaged to resemble Thomas Edison’s 1880 bulb. That paradigm is about to shift. Soon, a light won’t be a product, but a feature of a surface—any surface. Windows, walls and wallpaper, furniture, cars, and clothes: light will come from everywhere.
If OTI succeeds, Toronto-born Michael Helander will be the reason. He’s a force of nature, intense, ambitious, and at 29, astonishingly accomplished.
As a kid, he wanted to be a scientist. Then he enrolled in the U of T’s Engineering Science program (“because people said it was the hardest”) and realized he wanted to be an engineer. While working on his PhD with Zheng-Hong Lu (MSE), professor and Canada Research Chair in Organic Optoelectronics in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering (“They had lots of shiny equipment, so that got me excited”), he realized he really wanted to be an entrepreneur.
He reached that decision after stumbling on a major discovery. Helander and OTI cofounder Zhibin Wang (MSE MASc 0T8, PhD 1T2) were working with indium tin oxide (ITO)—the industry-standard, transparent yet-conductive coating used in every kind of flat-panel display—when they noticed something unexpected. Some of their samples were working far more efficiently—carrying much more current—than they should. They assumed their equipment was improperly calibrated, but soon ruled that out. The effect was real. Their ITO had been contaminated.
It took months to find the culprit: chlorine from open bottles of cleaning fluid. “Basically, breaking the safety rules,” Helander quips. “The next step: how do we make use of it?”
Helander, Wang and Professor Lu published their answer in Science in May of 2011: chlorinated ITO. A one-atom thick layer of chlorine dramatically increased the brightness of OLEDs while reducing their energy consumption by up to 50 per cent. It also drastically lowered their cost by reducing the number of organic layers needed to make a diode from as many as eight to just two or three.
That news was greeted with considerable interest. “Big companies started approaching us,” Helander says. “They wanted to license or buy the technology. We thought, if they’re willing to pay this much now, there must be much more value than they’re letting on. Let’s try making a go of it ourselves.”
So they created OTI Lumionics. The initials don’t stand for anything. It’s just ITO backwards, a declaration that their approach would be 180 degrees from usual. “Lumionics” is a fabricated word that sounds like light, a choice Helander somewhat regrets because nobody seems able to spell it.
At first, Helander thought OTI would be nothing more than a stepping-stone to an academic career. “When we started the company, we viewed it as another checkbox on the academic CV. Successfully commercialized tech: check.”
But as the months rolled by, a desire to finish what they’d started in the lab took root. Helander and Wang decided their future lay with OTI. Giving up academia for entrepreneurship wasn’t hard, Helander said. By the time he’d earned his PhD, his name was on over a hundred publications, more than most researchers produce in an entire career.
“When you get up to that number of publications it’s almost like a paper mill; it’s just a formula you’re repeating,” he says. “It felt like we had learned the game and it wasn’t challenging anymore. We wanted new challenges.”
New challenges? Check.
Helander takes me into the back corner of OTI’s new offices in the University of Toronto’s venerable Banting Building on College Street. The room is dominated by a seven foot-tall vacuum-deposition chamber that looks like a giant robotic squid.
“This is our rapid prototyping module for organic LEDs,” he explains. “It allows us to make large, flexible panels in about an hour.” He bends a six-inch square sheet of shiny blue-green plastic—a freshly-made OLED—into a half-cylinder. I want to ask for details, but Helander is already talking about his plans for the larger, still empty, room adjacent.
“The pilot scale-up next door will be the same process, except it’ll be ten modules next to each other, so the production time goes down from an hour to minutes.”
Before I can quiz him on that, he’s shifted gears again. “The step after that, starting next year, is building a full production plant, hopefully somewhere in southern Ontario.” Helander speaks very fast, at the edge of comprehensibility, skipping syllables and sometimes entire words in a losing fight to keep up with his own thoughts. “We’ll be pulling together a whole syndicate of partners that are throwing in a whole bunch of support. We’re hoping to get money from the province as well and raise another round of financing. It’s a massive project.”
Sounds ambitious, I manage to interject. “Very ambitious,” he agrees. “People tell us we have lack of focus. But to understand our customers, we have to have our hands in everything. At the same time, we’re a small company. For what we’re doing we should have ten times the personnel and twenty times the capital. Trying to do the impossible—that’s how you succeed.”
It’s clear Helander’s ambition doesn’t stop at table lamps. In fact, it doesn’t even include table lamps—or didn’t, until he and OTI’s senior product designer, Ray Kwa (EngSci 0T0 + PEY), built a few prototypes. Everyone who saw them had the same three questions: “When can I buy it? When can I buy it? When can I buy it?”
So OTI’s nine employees are making OLED panels and assembling lamps on College Street. At the same time, multibillion-dollar giants like Philips, LG and Konica Minolta are preparing to turn out OLED panels by the million. In a few months, OLED table lamps may be going for a fraction of the price—$239 (USD)—of an aerelight.
Remarkably, Helander is unfazed by that prospect. “That would make us so happy,” he says. “It would prove that we’re on the right track and the market is there.”
Helander’s plan is not to sell lamps but to service niches—lots and lots of niches—that are too small for the giants. “There are a lot of partners we work with who only want 10, 50, 100, units. A massive production line can’t do that effectively. Our vision is to enable hundreds of companies, delivering on-demand whatever people need, for applications in lighting, furniture, automotive, wearables, whatever you want.”
Like any entrepreneur, Michael Helander sounds more confident than he has any right to be. For the foreseeable future, OTI will live amongst threats: an untested market, ever-mutating technology, giants ready to grind him to paste, uncertain financial backing. To defend himself, Helander has little more than a small pool of talents, patents and ambitions.
Of course, in his case, that might just be enough.
Impact Magazine is an annual publication from University of Toronto Department of Materials Science & Engineering.
Two things we know: computers keep getting faster and smaller. Why? In large part because we continue to cram more processor cores on a single chip—but making all those processors talk to each other has become a key impediment to future progress.
Professor Natalie Enright Jerger (ECE) is discovering more efficient ways for on-chip networks to communicate, by tackling three challenges: improving communication between cores, caches and memory; streamlining caching protocols; and making parallel programming easier. The vital importance of her work was recognized this week with a Sloan Research Fellowship—one of just 16 awarded to computer scientists in the United States and Canada.
“I’ve followed the careers of the Sloan Research Fellows in my particular area of computer architecture, and there is typically zero to one recipient a year,” said Professor Enright Jerger. “So I wasn’t expecting it when I heard the news. I was thrilled—it’s a great honour.”
The Sloan Research Fellowships were established in 1955 to “stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.” Fellowships come with a $50,000 research grant over a two-year term.
The 2015 cohort, 126 Fellows across a variety of subject areas, was announced in a full-page ad in the February 23, 2015 edition of The New York Times.
One of eight recipients from a Canadian institution—six of which hail from the University of Toronto—Professor Enright Jerger joined the University of Toronto in 2009 as an assistant professor after completing her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her group has grown to comprise one post-doctoral fellow, six PhD and three Master’s candidates. She plans to use the research funds to support student stipends and fund students’ travel to conferences.
Professor Enright Jerger continues to distinguish herself as one of the top computer architecture researchers of her generation—last year she received the 2014 Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) Engineering Medal – Young Engineer for exceptional achievements in the field.
It began with the polar vortex of 2014. That’s when University of Toronto engineering alumni Jason Yakimovich (CompE 1T3+PEY) and Alex Huang (ElecE 1T3+PEY), fed up with low temperatures, developed the first intelligent heated base layer.
The “smart” shirt monitors body temperature to provide just the right amount of warmth for its wearer to enjoy outdoor sports—or simply walk from the front door to the subway entrance in comfort.
“That cold winter was the instigator,” said Yakimovich. “We had the idea, and things got pretty serious pretty quickly.”
The team launched a crowd-sourcing campaign on IndieGoGo, calling their star up FuelWear, and raised more than $84,000. They exceeded their target funding by 400 per cent.
Since then, FuelWear joined a U of T incubator for early-stage ideas called the Entrepreneurship Hatchery. They walked away with the program’s highest honour, the Lacavera Prize, which earned the team $20,000 to further develop their company.
FuelWear has attracted media attention from CBC, Financial Post, Huffington Post and elsewhere. And consumers are intensely interested, too.
“As we underestimated the demand for our product, we hit the production cap of our manufacturer in Canada within the first two weeks,” co-founder Clement Zhou told the Financial Post.
“Alex and Jason researched the market and refined the product until they had something that really resonated with people—truly smart clothing that adapted its heating to your activity level and temperature, yet remained comfortable and washable,” said Vaughn Betz (ECE), an associate professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering.
“The combination of engineering excellence, business acumen and sheer tenacity that they bring to a project has been the secret of their success, and a pleasure to witness.”
Now that they’re a year into building their startup, members of the FuelWear team say they’ve learned a lot and are using that knowledge to grow. Below, co-founder Yakimovich shares the latest news with U of T’s Brianna Goldberg.
What’s new with FuelWear since you won the Lacavera Prize?
We are working on producing the best possible quality Flame Baselayer. It hasn’t been easy; dealing with suppliers requires a very close watch, but we are well underway. We are also investigating potential product improvements and new products such as heated pants or heated leggings. We are looking to join U of T’s Creative Destruction Lab accelerator, a Silicon Valley-based accelerator called Y-combinator and we are seeking investors.
What have you learned about running a startup in the past few months?
We’ve learned a great deal about manufacturing. You can’t expect your suppliers to stick to any schedule you lay out, even if they agree to it. You have to allow for extra time to deal with things that go wrong. For example, our manufacturer of the actual shirt sewed approximately 100 heated patches incorrectly – they all had to be redone.
How has U of T helped you along the way?
The U of T Hatchery and its director, Joseph Orozco, as well as Professor Vaughn Betz, have been very useful.
Joseph has put us in contact with lawyers and accountants to help us with our incorporation, patent and payroll. And they have provided lots of useful advice regarding how to run a business.
Clement is still in school and is only taking a small course load so it is easy for him. Alex is working full time. And I am splitting my time between working for Amazon as a software engineer and working on FuelWear
What’s next for your company?
Next year is going to be an interesting one for FuelWear. Our aim is to grow by 10 times. As such, we are looking for both investment opportunities and another crowdfunding campaign. We have plans to reduce the size of the battery, relocate the heating zones and streamline production. Additionally, we are planning to build our online shop so that we can directly process sales.
It’s about to get a whole lot brighter in Toronto thanks to a significant investment from the Canadian government in a U of T Engineering alumnus’ sustainable lighting company.
OTI Lumionics, a company co-founded by alumnus Michael Helander (EngSci 0T7, MSE PhD 1T2), has been awarded $5.7 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) to implement a pilot production line capable of producing high volumes of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting panels.
“We can make large, flexible OLED panels in about an hour with our rapid prototyping module,” said Helander. “This new pilot production line will be the same process, except it’ll be ten modules next to each other, cutting down the production time from an hour to minutes.”
OTI is one of seven clean technology projects in Ontario announced to receive investments totalling more than $26.8 million from SDTC’s SD Tech Fund™, an initiative that is part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan, supporting jobs, economic growth and the environment.
Founded in 2011, OTI Lumionics was created by Helander and several of his U of T Engineering colleagues to commercialize their major breakthrough in OLED technology made during their doctoral studies. Today, OTI employs about a dozen employees—most of them U of T Engineering alumni—and is located in a 3,300 square foot office and lab space in the U of T Banting Building on College Street across from the MaRS Discovery District.
Their inaugural product—the world’s first OLED table lamp, aerelight—was launched to market in 2014.
“Congratulations to all of our U of T Engineering alumni at OTI Lumionics. This is a well-deserved recognition of the important work they are doing,” said Professor Jun Nogami, chair of the U of T Department of Materials Science & Engineering. “This investment shows that our federal government has a strong commitment to supporting leading edge technologies that will help grow Canada’s green research and development knowledge base as we all work towards a more sustainable future.”
Read more about Michael Helander and OTI Lumionics’ story in ‘The Glow of Confidence’ feature in the U of T Department of Materials Science & Engineering’s recently released Impact magazine.
David Yao (MASc 8T1, PhD 8T3), MIE alumnus and professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University, has been elected as Member to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Members—including U of T Engineering Dean Cristina Amon—rank among the world’s most accomplished engineers.
NAE membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice, or education. That includes significant contributions to the engineering literature, to the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, and to making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing innovative approaches to engineering education.
Yao was cited for his research of stochastic systems and their applications in engineering and service operations. “I am deeply grateful for the kindness and generosity of many colleagues at Columbia and elsewhere in helping me throughout my career,” said Yao, in an announcement made by Columbia University. As a PhD student at U of T’s Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering (MIE), Yao was supervised by Professor John Buzacott (MIE).
“On behalf of the MIE community, I would like to congratulate David Yao on this prestigious honour,” said Jean Zu, chair of MIE. “His election to NAE brilliantly demonstrates the high-calibre of engineers we graduate from our department. Yao is among many outstanding alumni making important contributions to engineering through leading-edge research.”
Your smartphone may keep getting smarter, but its network is struggling to keep up.
Demand for fast, cheap and plentiful data continues to surge, but wireless communications infrastructure is reaching the limits of what it can provide to users—unless we can find more efficient ways to engineer our networks.
Professor Wei Yu (ECE) is doing exactly that. A professor in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Yu has been awarded a 2015 E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).
The award allows researchers who show extraordinary promise to focus on their research, relieved of teaching and administrative duties for a two-year term. Each Fellow receives a research grant of $250,000. Up to six Fellows are named each year, and received their awards from the Governor General of Canada, David Johnston, at a ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on February 17, 2015.
“Being able to focus on research one-hundred per cent of the time is hugely important,” said Professor Yu. “The Steacie Fellowship makes it possible for me to recruit the best students and post-docs to my research program to help develop the next generation of wireless technologies.”
Professor Yu’s work tackles the design and optimization of wireless communication systems. “I’m passionate about information theory, which is the mathematical foundation of modern digital communications,” he said.
Yu is currently investigating novel ways that base-stations and smartphones in a radio-access network may cooperatively transmit and receive information to and from each other, in order to enhance signal quality and to reduce interference for wireless data access. His discoveries have impact on the network architecture, transceiver design and network deployment for future generation wireless cellular services.
Professor Yu’s work is already hugely influential—in 2014 he was named to Thomson Reuters’ rankings of the most highly cited scientific researchers in the world. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Information Theory and Wireless Communications.
“Wei Yu is known internationally not only as an exceptional scholar in the communications field, but for the applicability of his work to engineering practice,” said Professor Farid Najm, chair of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. “We are extremely proud and gratified to see him recognized with one of the most prestigious research awards in the country.”
University of Toronto researchers received three of the six E.W.R. Steacie awards conferred this year—the other Fellows include Professor Aaron Wheeler of the Department of Chemistry and Professor Leah Cowan of the Department of Molecular Genetics.
“My congratulations to all our NSERC award winners,” said Professor Vivek Goel, U of T’s vice president of research and innovation. “They are conducting both fundamental research that is pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and applied research that will improve health and quality of life worldwide in the coming years. We are grateful to NSERC for this recognition of and investment in U of T researchers.”