Brillian Bets on LCOS
By Jessica Davis -- Electronic News, 7/29/2004
reed-electronics.com
Consumer electronics semiconductor players got some extra company at this year's Consumer Electronics Show as giants in the compute business announced they would offer products to address the consumer side.
Chip titan Intel was one of them, announcing, among other things, that it would get into the market of making liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS), an emerging technology for displays -- big televisions.
Observers noted the technology would likely go head-to-head with a competing display technology from Texas Instruments -- digital light processing (DLP) -- that was already on the market, grabbing share in the big screen television space.
But for start-up company Brillian, Intel's announcement provided credibility to the LCOS space -- one that Brillian had already staked out.
"The first reaction people had was, 'Are you going to find a new business now that Intel has announced they are getting into LCOS?'" says Brillian CEO Vincent Sollitto. "I said, 'Not really.' LCOS is a much maligned technology."
But with a behemoth like Intel putting its might behind this emerging display space, it's not as maligned anymore.
Intel's LCOS takes a different approach than Brillian's, Sollitto says.
"They have excess Pentium foundry capacity and are looking for a way to use those factories," he says. "They are all on 0.13-micron while we use 0.35-micron."
Sollitto says that TI's DLP technology is the most popular right now because of the high quality it offers, and he believes that Brillian can build off the market for that technology. DLP technology, such as that offered by TI, relies on MEMS and micromirrors, he said. But like all technology, it has its limitations. Sollitto says it loses detail on dark screens because of the way the greyscale works. It also can encounter problems with a lot of motion.
Of course, Sollitto is a little biased. Still, he believes the LCOS is superior to DLP technology.
"When people look at our LCOS compared to DLP they like it better. It has a better image than DLP," he says. "People have characterized our technology as front projector quality images."
LCOS starts with a CMOS wafer where the display content is made. Those wafers then go into a process of developing an alignment layer to light the liquid crystal. A glass wafer is then bonded on top. This is then packaged into a miniature display that requires illumination and color.
Sollitto says that Brillian has developed a proprietary process that uses an inorganic alignment layer. This process and other trade secrets have enabled a high contrast ratio for Brillian displays.
Because Brillian is a U.S.-based start-up, it faced more than just technology challenges to its success in the display market.
"First, we aren't TI," Sollitto says. "Japanese aren't thrilled with working with a U.S. single source company. You don't see a lot of DLP TVs coming from the Japanese. And when you are a small single source company, you are out of luck."
So when Sollitto joined the company a year ago, he looked at a way to create a market for Brillian's products. He arrived at a plan for Brillian to be an integrated device manufacturer of sorts -- building its own televisions from its own LCOS devices.
"Because of the infrastructure that has been put in place by TI for DLPs, it's been possible for us to manufacture these," Sollitto says. "We were able to put together a virtual manufacturing operation, outsourcing to various facilities."
And Brillian has struck a deal with a national consumer electronics retailer who will be introducing a new private label in-store brand for itself in August and using the Brillian television as the flagship product for that brand.
The TV's will come in at a high price point to start, about $8K.
And these TVs will come out of the labs and into the stores in August, as Brillian began shipping in earlier this month.
"You'll know it's ours because of the contrast ratio," Sollitto says. "We'll have the kind of contrast ratio that you can get with plasma but the things you don't like -- the burn in, lifetime issues and pixelation." |
