Here is a consultant's summary of the SID meeting.
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International Display Report is one of over 50 timely electronic
publications from the SEMI Newsletter Service, an information
resource of Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International
(SEMI), an international trade association of semiconductor and
flat panel display equipment and materials suppliers. For SEMI
Newsletter information call 415.940.6919, cwilliams@semi.org.
For SEMI organization information call 415.940.6902.
This report was prepared by Dave Mentley, Director of Display
Industry Research at Stanford Resources. Comments and contrary
opinions are encouraged along with suggestions for future topics.
Mailing address: P. O. Box 325, El Cerrito, CA 94530. Telephone
(510) 526-8919; Fax (510) 528-9331; email: dem510@aol.com.
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May 17, 1996
The 1996 Society for Information Display Symposium is just wrapping up.
Rather than provide a detailed description of ALL of the significant things,
this newsletter will highlight some of the important announcements,
technology papers and industry trends that could be uncovered. The first
impression that I am sure many attendees also had was that this business is
now extremely complicated. It was always complicated, but it now borders on
the incomprehensible. Single display technologies (LCD, FED, plasma, for
example) are fragmenting into many different directions. Even within active
matrix LCDs, there are now so many different variations that it is almost
impossible now to discuss a generic type. Exhibited displays continue to
improve in appearance, but in order to understand how they work and why they
are improved over the previous generation (typically 3 months ago) you will
have to work pretty hard. The upshot is -- it is so complex that it is not
safe to believe everything you read about display progress in the press
releases, securities analyses or newspapers -- the trade press is usually
OK, though.
The next major trend is that many of the breakthroughs were not merely
presented in technical papers. There were several major breakthroughs which
were not laboratory results, but were very close being implemented in
marketable products. There used to be a lead time of two years between a
truly significant breakthrough and product shipment (STN, film compensation,
etc.) Now we see and hear about the breakthrough in a pre-production
prototype which is only several months away from the market. Sometimes it
is on the exhibit floor, sometimes in the papers. Why is this happening?
Probably because there are armies of developers working on products rather
than a few dozens. Now to the specifics..
Viewing angle of LCDs
In another sure sign of the maturing of the AM LCD market, viewing angle
improvement has become a major focus. What was once just a minor nuisance
and a point of differentiation between active and passive matrix addressing
has now become an obsession. The idea is to get to the same viewing quality
as the CRT monitor in an LCD. It now is a fait accompli. In fact, there
are LCD monitors which have better performance than some CRT monitors. As
with everything else, the means to improve the viewing angle is very
complicated. The latest and most intriguing is the in-plane switching mode.
Hitachi's Super TFT is based on this technique and NEC just unveiled their
version. Both samples were nothing short of stunning. There is much
discussion about the complexity, power consumption and speed of these
displays, but the results so far show that they do work and clearly can be
made. Keep in mind that this technique is not new - it was invented decades
ago - but the tools to implement it are now here. Other improvements in
viewing angle are made by high voltage drivers (by Vivid and others),
thinner cell spacing, multiple alignment domains and other tricks.
Packaging
Notebook computer users used to ask why the manufacturers left so much of a
border around the display. Why not just make the display bigger? The
drivers, mechanical packaging and other circuits often made a border of more
than one inch around the display. This not only irritates customers, it
wastes glass and even more importantly, it wastes precious production
capacity. Mitsubishi quietly unveiled a new 12.1-inch TFT LCD with a 3.5 mm
border at the bottom. This means that the distance from the bottom of the
module to the edge of the display viewing area is only 3.5 mm. The left and
top borders are larger, but not by an excessive amount. Quite a feat of
mechanical and electrical packaging! The ability to do this advanced
packaging could separate the display world into the haves and have-nots of
packaging, and this will have serious implications for the ability to
address advanced applications. High density electronic packaging is not a
trivial task.
Flat panel monitors
While there is still no hard data on the near term future of the desktop CRT
monitor replacement, the ball is definietly rolling. The wide angle TFT
LCDs discussed above play a key role in the viability of this market. Price
clearly plays the biggest role. A few things happened at the SID meeting to
further accelerate the transition.
NEC quietly unveiled a 20.x-inch, 1280 by 1024 display based on a type of
in-plane switching. Excuse the vagaries, but they had no written specs on
the demo and it was just unveiled. The display was truly astounding. There
were ONE OR TWO dead sub-pixels out of about 3 million. The viewing angle
was about plus and minus 80 degrees in the horizontal and vertical. The
colors were saturated and it used analog addressing. Samples are expected to
go out at $5,000 later this year. Expect every stock trader in the U.S. to
have about 5 of these things.
How is this possible? I suspect that this is an unexpected result of the
bottom dropping out of the 8.x to 10.x-inch TFT market. Since these smaller
displays apparently can't even be given away, it make sense to take the old
fabs and make something that is desired. Instead of 4-up 9.4- or
10.4-inchers, why not make a 1-up 20.8-incher? It won't be a multi-million
unit market, but the high end of the monitor market has been begging for
workstation type flat panel displays for years. IBM/DTI is reportedly doing
a similar thing with their 16-inch TFT LCD, but without the in-plane switching.
To complicate the picture even more, Fujitsu revealed that they will have a
workstation quality, 25-inch diagonal, 1280 by 1024 color AC plasma display
in 1997. This is the first time that anything better than 0.50 mm dot pitch
has been discussed for color plasma. How they will produce it is still unclear.
Miniature displays
Some of the most intriguing research and development work is going on the
miniature display area. Miniature displays are sub-one-inch, high
resolution (>= VGA format) displays. Besides the poly-Si TFT, there are
many, many new approaches. Thin film EL, diffraction gratings with and
without LC, polymer dispersed LC on Si, LED, FEDs, field sequential PDLC on
a chip and the DMD are a few of the most developed approaches. There are
probably many more. The applications beyond camcorder viewfinders are yet
to be fully explored, but communications and medical devices will probably
be among the first. We should expect very good colors and high pixel counts
in the near future.
Organic emitters
An old style SID rush developed when Pioneer brought its OLED demo out at
the author interviews on Thursday. The 256 by 64 pixel green display looked
excellent. The contrast ratio was reported at 100:1 and the luminance was
100 nits. This sample was based on the Alq system (licensed from Eastman
Kodak) and a consumer car audio product using this display is expected from
Pioneer later this year. Many, many companies are now exploring the organic
light emitters.
Plasma displays
The search is now on for advanced manufacturing techniques to make very
large area, low cost color plasma displays. Despite all of the
announcements about products and investments, there is still not a clear
path to a display which could be priced for wide acceptance in the consumer
television market. Not that it won't happen, it just is not yet clear. The
only thing that is clear is that far more manufacturing capacity has been
announced than could possibly be sold into the non-consumer market and no
one has dared yet to announce a CRT-like price target. Sony's demo of the
plasma addressed LCD also looked very good for video in its current 25-inch
size. Structurally, it is looking more and more like a screen printed
plasma display with an LCD stuck on top. The cost trade-offs will be color
phosphors and high voltage, high current drivers versus LCD and color
filters with high and low voltage, low current drivers.
These items only begin to scratch the surface. There are many other issues
in projectors, materials, device architectures and so on.
This report was prepared by Dave Mentley, V.P., Display Research at Stanford
Resources, Inc. Comments and contrary opinions are encouraged along with
suggestions for future topics.
Mailing address: P. O. Box 325, El Cerrito, CA 94530
Telephone (510) 526-8919; Fax (510) 528-9331;
email: dem@ix.netcom.com
Copyright 1996
Stanford Resources Inc.
All rights reserved.
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