Dr. Ching Tang and Steven Van Slyke have been jointly inducted into the 2013 Consumer Electronics (CE) Hall of Fame for their contributions to the advancement of the consumer electronics industry.
After receiving his B.S. in chemistry from Ithaca College, Van Slyke joined Eastman Kodak in 1979. He was hired by Dr. Ching Tang, who was working on photovoltaics – solar panels – and thin film electroluminance.
Tang had discovered that light was emitted by organic thin film photovoltaics when a light voltage was applied. Van Slyke’s job was to locate the right organic compounds that would sustain this voltage-enabled emitted light.
One of these compounds was an organometallic compound called "metal chelate." After purification, the chelate was incorporated into an OLED device that operated overnight. When Tang and Van Slyke arrived the next morning, they stared at the still glowing device with wonder – it retained nearly the same brightness in the morning as it had the previous evening.
Over the following decade, Van Slyke and Tang refined the “metal chelate” and developed processes that finally resulted in the fabrication of demonstration devices emitting red, green and blue colors, as well as a stable fabrication process.
Van Slyke and Tang’s breakthroughs resulted in their development of self-illuminating OLEDs that convert electrical energy into light via a stack of thin organic layers sandwiched between a transparent anode and a metallic diode.
In the late 1990s, Kodak and Sanyo formed a joint venture to manufacture full-colour active matrix OLED displays. Van Slyke led the technology transfer, which resulted in the first full-colour OLED display to be incorporated into a commercial product. In March 2003, Kodak announced its 3.1 MP Kodak EasyShare LS633 digital camera, equipped with a “NuVue” 2.2-inch active matrix OLED screen, or AM-OLED, a subset of OLED. This first OLED-equipped gadget paved the way for others, especially from Samsung, which now sells more than 300 million AM-OLED displays for smartphones each year.
In 2000, Van Slyke and Tang received the Eastman Innovation Award; the following year, Van Slyke and Tang received an Industrial Innovation Award from the American Chemical Society (ACS) for their work with OLEDs, as well as the Jan Rajchman Prize of the Society for Information Display (SID). In 2004, they were co-recipients of the ACS Award for Team Innovation.
Dr Ching Tang is now a professor at the University of Rochester
Tang was born on a rice and chicken farm in Yuen Long, a poor village on Hong Kong’s outskirts, in 1947. After attending King’s College, a high school in Hong Kong, Tang graduated with a B.S. in chemistry from the University of British Columbia, Canada in 1970. He went on to pursue his graduate study in Cornell, where he earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1975, and then immediately joined Eastman Kodak as a research scientist.
Steven Van Slyke is now CTO and co-founder at Kateeva.
Van Slyke was born in 1956, in Denver, Colo., to Anna and Dr. Barton Van Slyke, a radiologist. During his childhood, Van Slyke displayed a flair for science. He bounced between physics and chemistry in college, but was inspired to major in chemistry by one of his professors at Ithaca College, where Van Slyke spent summers researching solar energy storage. But Van Slyke retained an interest in electrical engineering, which would figure prominently in his later OLED work.
