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To: voop who wrote (19887)	3/19/2000 12:38:00 PM
From: FLSTF97	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Kopin Voop sorry I took so long to respond; darn day job got in the way. During my day job, I met recently with an old friend who has worked with John Fan since the mid 80's. He has a very high opinion of him and the organization. In particular he thinks their display technology is very strong relative to the more traditional suppliers ( and he knows them all very well.) The patent links you supplied, I've reviewed and make general comments. To fully gauge their value one would need to compare them to cited patents owned by others and I just do not have the bandwidth to dig that deep. The Display illumination patent probably gives them a very nice carve out. This has application not just in a projection display but any with backlighting. A big power drain in portable devices is the backlighting which is almost always needed for good clarity. By increasing the light utilization efficiency they can supply a huge advantage to a device manufacture (longer battery life). Unfortunately I'm not aware of alternate techniques to contrast against them (perhaps there aren't any). This same technology has benefits in projector technology even though power drain is not an issue. The bulbs are horribly expensive and being able to use less power should increase their lifetime, reduce the temp., and the cool down time. The patent on bonding multilayer chips could have widespread benefits. My guess is this applies currently only to their display devices. The real benefit may be yet to surface. This technology would allow mating dissimilar materials (logic circuits in Si and say LED materials like GaN and then add in high speed GaAs)to make a single "chip". There are a lot of potential problems with the viability of implementing this patent in general such as differential thermal expansion rates and heat extraction from internal layers. Nevertheless, if these are not issues for a specific application, the technique could raise performance to new levels and perhaps lead to a single device performing the work currently done by multiple chips. I guess I should also mention that the patent may to some extent be a way to solve the problems I mentioned above. For instance a layer could be bonded into the middle of a stack just to extract excess heat. I still want to think about whether these patents could be discontinuous. I think the potential is there but for the multilayered chip I'm not sure how readily it can be brought to practice for any significant application (other than the display drivers) FATBOY