2022-Korea-Showcase-Nano-C

SPEAKER 1: [SPEAKING KOREAN]

KERIN HARWOOD: Thank you everyone for having me. My name is Kerin Perez Harwood, I'm director of business development at Nano-C. Nano-C is a world leader in nanostructured carbon materials. We were founded by the late Dr. Jack Howard, who was an MIT professor emeritus, and world-renowned leader in the manufacture of nanostructured carbon materials.

I don't know how to work this.

So Nano-C is focused on applying advanced materials to solve global challenges. Right now, the markets need advanced materials to solve challenges, such as clean energy, Moore's law, and the need to reduce energy consumption. But those materials are just not meeting the needs of the applications.

Nano-C provides advanced material solutions in the form of carbons to derive new levels of performance in devices, and enable technologies that solve these global problems.

So everything starts with manufacturing for Nano-C. So we manufacture nanostructured carbon materials, including fullerenes and single-walled carbon nanotubes through a combustion-based commercial scale manufacturing process, which can use biofuels as the catalyst. The benefit of this manufacturing process, which was developed at MIT, is that you can scale it up, and it's a continuous manufacturing process versus the batch-based processes that our competitors use.

Aside from the manufacturing process, over the years, Nano-C has developed a portfolio of 250 patents that are focused on fictionalizing, or modifying, these base materials-- the fullerenes and the carbon nanotubes. So what we do is we add what we call-- through downstream processing-- add these different capabilities through value-added chemistry, which are application-specific.. So we create application-specific products for our customers.

The markets that we're focusing on are broadly are in electronics and energy. Our customers, then, take these functionalized materials, which are application specific, and apply them at the device level to enable enhanced performance and new functionalities.

So the next couple of use cases are going to be focused on organic electronics. And this first example, our customer was using a typical system, a PN-type system, for an organic photovoltaic-- basically a thin film solar printed device. Typically you would use C60 PCBM, which is a standard fullerene product. What Nano-C did was provide the customer and develop a advanced material solution called FD23, which is a new fullerene derivative.

The customer was seeking an increase in thermal stability, because their lamination of step was at 120c. And as you can see in the data here, the FD23 material performs much better than the standard C60 PCBM. So the FD23 was able to change the morphology, stabilizing the morphology of the active layer of the device, which is the photoactive layer. Increase thermal stability, increased lifetime, as well as increasing the performance of the device under light soaking.

So this material is now designed into our customer's device, who is a manufacturer in Europe.

So customers are not just concerned about the stability of their device but the stability of their supply chain. In this example, Nano-C provides a standard fullerene to a large Japanese chemical company to enable a thin film of OPD sensor, a thin film fingerprint sensor. The benefit of this is that it's cheaper than a silicon fingerprint sensor, and also the ability to print it in large areas. So you can have the fingerprint sensor be the size of your smartphone.

So Nano-C was able to win this design win, if you will, because of our ability to manufacture fullerenes at scale. The high quality of our materials-- so our materials have been reported to us by our customers as being the highest quality out there. And the fact that we have just a lot of patents and know-how on these materials. So we have the ability-- our customers are confident in our ability to make more advanced materials for applications like this.

So Korea is a very important market for Nano-C because of the strong electronics, chemicals, and mobility industries, and the need for those industries to utilize nanostructured carbon. Currently, we do have some traction in Korea-- we work with a distributor, primarily to support our customers and acquire new business.

Our materials are being evaluated by large companies here, as well as smaller ones. And they're compliant with local regulations, including safety and import regulations.

We're here really to expand our relationships with existing customers, but also to establish new relationships. And we eventually would like to have more local representation in Korea, because we understand the importance of the markets here.

So we are looking for strategic partnerships with OEMs, application development partners, and electronic material suppliers in the energy electronics and semiconductor space. Right now, in terms of OEMs, we're looking to partner with OEMs that are making high efficiency solar, like tandem solar, thin film solar, and thin film biometric devices, specifically around electronic transfer materials.

We're also looking to partner with companies that are focusing on battery additives. And then, for applications development, we currently have a flexible transparent electrode that's in development, and are looking for development partners to take this material to commercialization.

And then, finally, in the semiconductor space, we partner with a company called Irresistible Materials, who is located in the UK. Together, we have developed in EUV photoresist, as well as a spin on carbon hard mask for lithography applications for advanced semiconductors. And we are currently looking for formulation scale-up partners to enable us to distribute this to larger tier one semiconductor manufacturers.

Thank you for your time. My name is Kerin Perez Harwood, and I will be at the showcase. Thank you for the opportunity.

[APPLAUSE]