Editor’s Note: On Sept. 6, 2023, Shoei Chemical, a leading advanced materials manufacturer, announced that it had acquired Nanosys, the industry leader in quantum dots. Printed Electronics Now spoke with Jeff Yurek, VP of marketing for Shoei Electronic Materials Inc., about the acquisition as well as recent advances in the field of quantum dots and the announcement that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the founders of quantum dot technology.


Printed Electronics Now: It’s been a very interesting year for quantum dots and for Nanosys. First, the acquisition of Nanosys by Shoei. How long has Nanosys worked with Shoei, and what led to Shoei acquiring Nanosys?

Jeff Yurek: Nanosys first partnered with Shoei in 2019. Shoei developed and publicized a breakthrough in the optical performance of their Indium Phosphide quantum dots that really got Nanosys’ attention. We connected and almost immediately began working closely together with Shoei as a manufacturing partner. By 2021 Nanosys began transferring QD manufacturing to Shoei and by the start of 2023, 100% of Nanosys quantum dot production was already being handled by Shoei Chemical.

Nanosys focused on QD innovation and Shoei on delivering scale and quality. The synergies between the two companies were really clear and the acquisition was a natural next step.


Printed Electronics Now: What is Shoei Chemical’s particular strength, and how will the combination of both companies’ strengths benefit customers?

Jeff Yurek: Since the company’s founding in 1956, Shoei Chemical has built a reputation as a trusted, dependable supplier that can deliver the highest quality materials at scale. Today, Shoei Chemical is a top manufacturer of nanoscale materials used in various applications. For example, they are a market leader in supplying nickel pastes for multi-layer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs). MLCCs are a key component of modern thin and light consumer electronics devices like smartphones. Some of the world’s largest brands rely on Shoei to supply these materials for their most important products.

Quantum dots naturally fit Shoei’s strengths in high-quality, high-volume nanomaterials manufacturing. Shoei will continue to operate the Nanosys brand, retaining its identity as the premier supplier of quantum dot materials. Nanosys will continue to focus on what we do best: innovating and developing industry-leading quantum-dot technologies for customers and partners across the display industry.

We think that combining Shoei Chemical’s extensive manufacturing capabilities and Nanosys’ expertise in quantum dot technology will bring about a new era of growth and advancements in quantum dot technology.


Printed Electronics Now: I saw with much interest that Louis Brus, Moungi Bawendi and Alexei Ekimov, pioneers in the field of quantum dots, received the extremely prestigious Nobel Prize in Chemistry – congratulations to them! How were they instrumental to the founding of and growth of Nanosys over the years?

Jeff Yurek: It’s exciting news for everyone involved in Quantum Dots, and it has a special meaning for Nanosys and Shoei Chemical. We owe much to the quantum dot advancements of all three Nobel awardees but especially to Dr. Bawendi, who was a scientific co-founder at Nanosys when the company was formed in 2001, and Dr. Brus, who served on Nanosys’ scientific advisory board for many of the company’s early years as it worked to commercialize quantum dots.

Shoei Chemical is completing construction on what will soon be the world’s largest quantum dot manufacturing facility in Itoshima, Japan. The modern quantum dot manufacturing process employed by Shoei Chemical today is a direct descendent of Dr. Bawendi’s breakthroughs in the early 1990s.

As we approach the end of 2023, over 70 million Quantum Dot display products have shipped to consumers worldwide. These three brilliant scientists, and many others who joined them in perfecting quantum dot chemistry, have made the world brighter and more vibrant. For that, we say congratulations and thank you!


Printed Electronics Now: How has quantum dot technology advanced over the years to where it is today?

Jeff Yurek: It’s a great question. You know, I’m sort of amazed to think that I have been working around quantum dots for more than 14 years. It hasn’t gotten boring yet, and I must admit that I’m as engaged and excited about the technology as ever. One major reason is that the technology and applications for QDs have evolved continuously.

Breakthroughs in optical performance and stability have enabled quantum dots to work harder so displays can do more. When we first started out, the industry’s goal was essentially to match the color performance of old-fashioned CRTs. Then, the target became reproducing the color capability of color movie film with extra brightness. Now, we are beginning to talk about reproducing most of the colors found in the natural world and beyond.

So, what started out as a “chicken and egg” problem, with QDs offering a new level of color capability and no content to take advantage of that capability, has turned into a virtuous cycle.

Another area of advancement has been in the functionalization of quantum dots and their introduction into new types of displays and components. QD-OLED is a great example of this, with quantum dots being formulated into inks to be inkjet printed in discrete colors at the front of the display.

The last advancement I would highlight is scale. When our first product shipped in 2013, quantum dots were essentially hand-made at the lab scale. It was enough to serve our first few products, but to serve a meaningful portion of the display industry, which produces a quarter billion square meters of displays every year, we needed orders of magnitude more scale. This, again, is where Shoei Chemical comes in. Today, Shoei is producing QDs in huge reactors at the thousands of liters scale.


Printed Electronics Now: Along those lines, where does QD stand today on the market, and where is it likely to head in the near future?

Jeff Yurek: Quantum dots have been incredibly successful in premium displays, especially TVs. For example, if we look at the premium segment of the TV market, Quantum Dot technologies, including both quantum dot LCDs and quantum dot OLEDs, combine for more than 50% market share. It’s a big achievement, but there’s a lot of room for growth. If we zoom out and consider the entire display market, quantum dot technologies make up about 10% of all displays on an area basis.

As high-performance display applications become more mainstream, consumers are demanding more from their displays. One good example is the recent adoption of high dynamic range and wide color gamut technology for NFL broadcasts on Thursday and Sunday nights. If you haven’t seen an NFL game in wide color gamut on a massive 75”+ quantum dot screen… it’s pretty amazing! So, I see a huge opportunity for continued growth of QD adoption in mainstream displays in addition to the premium segments.

Displays are only the first act for quantum dots, too. Some of the wild applications that we looked at but wrote off as too challenging from a performance or cost requirement standpoint are getting closer to commercialization thanks to advances in QD performance and scale. These applications include anti-counterfeiting, agriculture, and solar windows, to name a few. A company called UbiQD, who we have partnered with in the past, has done some great work establishing these use cases. The availability of more stable, higher performance, lower cost QDs will soon enable adoption in these areas. We may look back in another decade and find that display is only a small part of the QD story!