Samsung Electronics announced on Tuesday it had acquired the IP assets of Clairvoyante Inc., the creator of PenTile sub-pixel-rendering display technology and related gamut-mapping algorithms. Samsung has funded a new company called Nouvoyance Inc., which will continue all of the engineering and R&D activities formerly pursued at Clairvoyante. Clairvoyante will be dissolved when the IP transfer has been completed; IP marketing and management will now be handled by Samsung.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

Clairvoyante founder and CTO Candice Brown Elliott becomes Nouvoyance’s CEO. Clairvoyante CEO Joel Pollack becomes interim president of Nouvoyance during a several-month transition period. Pollack told me yesterday that Samsung engineers are now receiving training at Nouvoyance’s Cupertino, California headquarters.

There’s a story here about the difficulties of building a successful display-related company, even one based on a technology that seems to offer a strong value proposition. In the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you that my colleague Sungkyoo Lim and I were intimately involved as consultants in establishing the initial contact between Samsung and Clairvoyante a half dozen years or so ago, and participated in the initial meetings. Those meetings resulted directly in a technology development agreement between the two companies, and indirectly to the agreement through which Samsung became Clairvoyante’s first licensee.

Since that time, Clairvoyante has “engaged with” – Pollack’s turn of phrase – about 20 LCD companies and half a dozen semiconductor companies. Many of those companies, including Samsung, have produced technology demonstrators using various flavors of PenTile technology, and a couple of companies came close to volume production. (BOE Hydis was forced into bankruptcy proceedings shortly before volume production of a PenTile panel was scheduled to start.) In the end, eight years without the income that would have derived from the licensing fees on a high-volume product were too much. Clairvoyante needed a buyer, several companies recognized the technology’s value approached them and the history of the company came full circle. It was Samsung who was the logical choice and it was Samsung who purchased the company’s assets at the end.

How PenTile technology does what it does is too subtle to be covered here, but there’s a good explanation on the Clairvoyante website (www.clairvoyante.com). The effect is that a Pentile display produces an image with an average of 2 sub-pixels per pixel that is equivalent to an image on a standard RGB stripe display with 3 sub-pixels per pixel. The result is greater resolution at the same cost or the same resolution at reduced cost, as well as greater aperture ratio. If the display is limited by pixel pitch, you can look at a PenTile display as providing greater image resolution for a given pixel pitch, and that could be important as product designers ask for small displays with ever-higher resolutions.

So why didn’t the display world beat a path to Clairvoyante’s door? For one thing, although the technology is easy to demonstrate and manufacture, many people find it hard to understand. The Samsung team understood the benefits very quickly but it took other potential partners much longer.

However, it seems the death of Clairvoyante may be exactly what it takes for PenTile technology to find commercial success.

What are Samsung’s plans for products and applications? According to Pollack, it’s more than just mobile products.

For an expanded version of this story including an interview with Joel Pollack and future plans for the technology, see the up-coming April edition of Mobile Display Report.

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