Hi, Bill. Thanks for the heads-up on Alien.
Judging from their technology overview,
alientechnology.com ,
they appear to be eyeing the same markets as the OLED people. In the press release about the recent $80 million round of financing, the CEO of DuPont Displays (an investor) says that they envision using NanoBlocks in conjunction with their OLED technology.
Alien has chosen flexible displays for smart cards as their first product. No doubt that application requires "low-end consumer-product pricing." Good luck to them. However, it's not a microdisplay application and is therefore outside of Kopin's bailiwick. At one time, GemPlus was working with Kopin to incorporate the CyberDisplay into a compact smart card reader; I don't know the current status of that project.
Notice in this paragraph that Alien is referring to direct-view displays:
The FSA process uses single crystal silicon NanoBlocks IC's fabricated on standard silicon wafers, in industry standard CMOS wafer foundries. Standard 6-inch CMOS wafers can yield millions of tiny (tens of microns square) NanoBlocks IC's. Depending on the complexity of the displays being manufactured (simple one-line pager displays to full color SXGA desktop computing displays), a standard 6 inch CMOS wafer can produce dozens to thousands of yielded direct-view displays.
The advantages of using standard CMOS wafer foundries are also shared by microdisplay manufacturers, including Kopin. In fact, they have a further advantage in that the pixel control circuitry for the entire display is formed at that stage of processing, in contrast to Alien's approach which subsequently requires (self)assembly of the elements and deposition of interconnects (photo shows proof of concept with sputtered aluminum interconnects). In Kopin's case, lift-off technology makes it possible to form the circuitry on single crystal silicon so thin (less than 2 microns) as to be transparent. It is claimed that NanoBlocks can be as little as 10 microns in dimension. However, they must at minimum be thick enough to maintain structural integrity; the 70 and 185 micron blocks shown have a truncated pyramidal structure and the 185 micron block appears to be about 40 microns thick.
Imo, Aliens's technology is not particularly well-suited for microdisplays and it will be a long time, if ever, before they invade Kopin's galaxy.
WT |
