SID is where display ideas are demonstrated and evaluated. There are lots of these ideas as well as evolutionary and even revolutionary ideas floated at SID each year. It is where you will see the next big thing in the display industry or some company’s folly in pursuing a pipe dream. The key is to understand who is pitching which. Today, I will look at two of them I heard about in private meetings.

Chris Chinnock
Senior Analyst and Editor
for Insight Media

The two companies are Pixtronix and UniPixel. Both are early stage display companies with plenty of capital behind them to pursue a big dream. They want to use their technology to make LCDs obsolete, but use some of the LCD foundries to make these new displays.

Bold dreams yes, and after hearing the pitches, both actually show some merit. Can they pull it off? Time will tell.

It used to be that 20 years was required to bring a new display technology to a mainstream commercialization state. This time appears to be shrinking - and if you believe these companies, it may now be possible in 4-5 years. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but I am leaning toward the shorter rather than longer side.

So what are these new technologies, you ask? They are similar, but slightly different. Both eliminate the color filters, polarizers, liquid crystal, light management films and even the CCFL in a conventional LCD. What they have in common is an LED-driven backlight with light recycling components, a MEMS or MEMS-like modulator to extract the light at each pixel and an active matrix backplane.

Pixtronix has developed what it calls a Digital Micro Shutter (DMS). The idea is to extract light from the backlight by opening up a pixel gate. Think of this as a pair of pocket doors that open up to allow light to escape. It is an all-digital approach that uses pulse width modulation at each pixel to control grayscale.

Unipixel’s approach is called Time Multiplexed Optical Shutter (TMOS) (see graphic). It features a special membrane matrix that rides above the LED backlight and a TFT pixel array. When activated, it is electrostatically drawn down and contacts the backlight. The micro-optic layer changes the optical characteristics at the point of contact allowing light to escape through the carrier layer and out into the world.

These ideas are clever and elegant. When compared to the structure of an LCD, they will indeed eliminate a lot of components. And, both companies are targeting using LCD fabrication equipment to make these displays. With some minor adjustments, existing LCD fabs can transition to these new displays fairly easily. And they are scalable approaches for any sized display.

This all sounds marvelous - and it is quite exciting. But both companies have a lot of development work ahead of them to prove they can deliver the goods. There is a lot more to their stories that I can’t reveal, but suffice it to say that these are companies we will be tracking to see how they meet their milestones. SID 08 will again prove to be the place where dreams are made or companies are brought down to reality.