Lots of people in the display business are excited about the potential of laser-lit displays. Those people who still think microdisplay-based rear-projection TVs (RPTVs) have a future are pinning their hopes on the combination of laser illumination and 1080p LCOS imagers because the combination promises high image quality along with reduced cost.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

Front projectors for business and education, which, unlike RPTVs, are projected to continue their sales growth into the foreseeable future, will also benefit from cost reduction, expanded color gamut, simpler system design, and the elimination of frequent (and expensive) bulb replacements.

And solid-state lasers will enable pico-projectors: tiny projectors that could be the size of your mobile handset and plug into it for moderately large images wherever you go. Such projectors could also be built into portable devices, but those devices would have to be big enough to incorporate a battery of reasonable capacity. A pico-projector could be made to fit into a mobile handset, but battery life would be short. (Pico-projectors will be appearing shortly, but penetration of the total available market will be slow, unless very low price points can be achieved, as Insight Media’s new "Pico-Projector Market Segment Analysis" indicates.)

Most exciting to a flat-panel guy such as yours truly is the early-stage development of laser backlight units (BLUs) for LCD-TV panels, which could provide LED-like color gamuts at a fraction of the cost.

One of the leading developers of solid-state lasers appropriate for display applications is Novalux. Its Novalux Extended Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (Necsel) offers high performance at relatively low manufacturing cost.

Novalux has been developing its unique technology for a long time; it started at the dawn of this millennium when fiber-optic communications was still hot, and that was its original intended application. More recently, we have seen attractive RPTV prototypes and promising BLU prototypes, but Necsel volume production was not yet at hand.

Not until now. Yesterday, Novalux announced it had sold its Silicon Valley prototype wafer fab, and is now outsourcing Necsel wafer processing to large-capacity contract manufacturers in Taiwan.

"This is a key step in the company’s transition from low-volume prototype manufacturing to mass-producing lasers for high-volume consumer electronics applications," said Novalux COO William Mackenzie. "We’ve qualified and frozen our chip design and processes. This has enabled us to move our Necsel wafer processing from our prototype quick-turn fab, with its very limited capacity, to much larger contract manufacturing facilities in Taiwan."

Executive VP of Marketing Greg Niven explained to me this morning that Novalux will continue to grow its own epitaxial wafers in Sunnyvale. The company added a second AIXTRON multiwafer MOCVD reactor in July. "Each reactor can make over one million lasers per year," Niven said, "for a total of two million lasers per year." The wafers will be shipped to the contract manufacturers, who do wafer processing and dicing. The chips will then be sent to a second contract manufacturer who will attach the dies to a sub-mount, test and burn in. Novalux will ship these fully qualified laser arrays to partner companies, including Oerlikon, Young Optics and Seiko-Epson, who finish and package the visible RGB lasers for delivery to consumer electronics companies.

Niven said that Novalux has design wins for its core microdisplay projector business, including both front and rear projectors. The company expects customers to be showing products this year. "This will be a transitional year," Niven said, with product volumes being relatively small. He expects products to be delivered in high volumes in 2009.

And what about the laser BLUs that intrigues me so much? "Customers are developing proof-of-concept units now," said Niven. We probably won’t see production units until 2010."

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