An old article relating to Applied Nanotech Inc(ANI), a subsidiary of NNPP. With FED carbon nanotube based flat panel monitors coming to market as we speak, the potential for NNPP is huge given their patents in this field.
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ANI Hoping Nanotubes Leave the Display Market Flat
By Allen Bernard
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By marrying a paradigm shifting technology to current-day cathode ray tube (CRT) display manufacturing and assembly techniques, Applied Nanotech, Inc. (ANI) expects its technology to revive a flagging worldwide industry and come to dominate the $20 billion flat-panel display market.
But the company will not do this directly or alone. Competing with the likes of Samsung and other industry giants as a newcomer would be commercial suicide. Rather, ANI will leverage its more than 80 issued patents surrounding the use of carbon nanotubes in next-generation CRT displays that will, according to ANI, enable the ailing CRT industry to produce the best flat-panel displays on the market.
Carbon nanotubes are straw-like tubes of pure carbon that are either single-walled or multiple-walled and are excellent conductors of electricity.
"What we are talking about here is carbon nanotube electron emission for display field emission applications, starting with very low resolution like the light emitting diode (LED) product (for outdoor screens) up to consumer, high-resolution, large-format televisions in homes," Zvi Yaniv, ANI's CEO, told NanotechPlanet.
With its portfolio of issued patents and another 80 or so pending, ANI believes it has effectively wrapped up the intellectual property rights surrounding the use of carbon nanotubes as the electron source in displays. Therefore, any company wishing to exploit nanotubes for this purpose will, one day, have to license the rights from ANI and pay them royalties.
"If competition is dealing with the premise of using carbon nanotubes for the emission of electrons, they are going to have to deal with us," said Marc Eller, Chairman and CEO of SI Diamond, the parent company of ANI. "Not only in field emission applications, but in any application that involves the emission of electrons using carbon nanotubes, they are going to have to deal with us."
Samsung, for example, has been working with flat-panel nanotube displays for some time and plans to introduce the first of these products within the next 12 months, according to Ed Moran, director of product innovation for Deloitte & Touche's Technology, Media and Telecom group. But, before this can happen, the company will have to pay ANI, Eller said.
In a May trip to Japan, Eller and Yaniv plan to continue talks with Canon, with which they have had multi-million dollar development deals in the past, Futaba Corp. and a few other firms about licensing deals. For now, however, ANI survives on corporate sponsored research, government grants and $1.1 million in sales to U.K.-based Oxford Instruments.
If the predictions are correct, ANI will find itself with a rather hefty income stream. The company believes it can eventually capture one-half of one percent of the $20 billion flat-panel display market through licensing and royalty payments. This equals approximately $100,000,000.
A recent research report by J.M. Dutton & Associates on SI Diamond valued ANI's intellectual property (IP) portfolio at between $40 million and $80 million. In the near term, the company will settle for the doubled revenues ($4.1 million) Dutton is predicting for 2002. |
