about Us

Welcome to 1-Material, your partner in Organic Nano Electronic (ONE=1) Material.

The Mission

1-Material sees the need and the necessity to standardize Organic Nano Electronic (ONE) materials for organic thin film applications, and also understands the challenges to do so. With its accumulated experience in synthesis, purification and characterization, the company is extending its focus to processing, formulation, and validation. Rather than to continuously pursue innovative structures, the company has dedicated itself to standardize these classic and most common studied materials, and to make them reliable and reproducible.

The Need

1-Material recognizes the need and necessity to standardize materials for organic opto-electronics, particularly for those applications based on organic thin film technology such as Organic Light Emitting Device (OLED), Organic Photovoltaics (OPV), Organic Thin Film Transistors (OTFT), Organic Radio Frequency Identification (ORFID), Organic Photo Conductor (OPC) and Organic Ion-Exchange Membrane (OIEM) to name just a few. Today, we observe increasing activity in organic electronics. Hundreds of organic materials, including small molecules, macromolecules, dendrimers and oligomers have been explored and offered by a variety of companies and distributors. Along with such a growing interest in research laboratory and in industrial commercialization, comes an increase in the inconsistencies associated with the performance of a given organic electronic material. Differences and non-reproducibility are apparent from one report to another, from one organization to another, and from one test to another even in the same laboratory and tested by the same scientist or engineer. Without a standard material, the reported data lose their significance for comparison and validation. Without a standard material, the industry loses its potential for scale-up and commercialization.

The Challenges

1-Material sees the need to standardize Organic Nano Electronic Materials and the challenges to do so. We understand that the purity of a chemical is the first criterion to be considered in order to produce a functional material for opto-electronic performance. The complexity and demands are even higher when a semi-conducting polymer is involved. The structures of polymeric based organic semiconductors are not completely defined, and neither are their characteristics. Chemically, the uncertainties which impact the opto-electronic properties of conducting polymers include the chain length, the conjugated length (conjugation may break at some position of the polymer chain), the effect conjugated length (not all conjugated chains contribute the same electron orbit density), the end-capped groups, and configuration of double bonds (cis or trans). If one could perfectly synthesize a structurally defined polymer, purification would still present an extra challenge, since sublimation techniques used for small molecule materials are not applicable to polymeric materials; Remove impurities such as metallic catalyst residue presents a considerable challenge. Next would be the behavior of the polymer solution. Its rheology (stress, relaxation, interaction between polymeric chains) depends on factors such as the nature of solvent, concentration, mixing mechanism and temperature to list just a few. All of these factors would impact the film properties of the product. It is very demanding to produce an organic film of a desired thickness with controlled density and molecular orientation. The molecular orientation in the film and the film density may be as important as the film thickness when its electronic (change mobility, change density) and opto-electronic properties ( exciton generation, charge combination, photo absorbing ….) are concerned.

The Solution

1-Material recognizes that the strategy to standardizing organic nano electronic materials involves the collaboration with various partners. We start by screening and providing an extended list of organic nano electronic materials (the list of extended products) for research and development in order to identify the most promising ones. Thereafter, the company works closely with industrial partners via a Joint Development Agreement (JDA) via numerous processing-performance iterations to establish a quality control measure. Subjected to the permission by the JDA partners, the standardized materials are further validated by third parties. Along with the JDA scope, 1-Material also has the mandate to establish the scale-up procedure along quality control criteria. Subsequent to the JDA partner permission or following a JDA exclusive supply period, the company releases these standardized materials to the public market as the featured products (the list of featured products).