The odds against successfully bringing a new display technology to market are immense, if not quite infinite.

The problem is that the entrenched technology - CRTs not too long ago, LCDs and PDPs now - develops such a massive manufacturing infrastructure, such an efficient supply chain, and such a wealth of processing know-how for enhancing yields and reducing costs that it’s virtually impossible for a new technology to compete directly.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

So where’s the next opportunity? One possibility is where the low-power, reflective, and good-visibility-in-high-ambient characteristics of electrophoretic displays or Cholesteric LCD are needed, but in addition, video rate response and, perhaps, color are also needed. And if the display does not need to be as large as E Ink’s Electronic Book displays and Bridgestone’s signage prototypes, that’s where Qualcomm MEMS Technology’s (QMT’s) mirasol displays come in.

Mirasol displays are based on QMT’s optical interference iMod technology, which was acquired along with Iridigm, the company that first developed it. Another technological approach to video-rate ePaper is electrowetting, being pursued by LiquiVista (Eindhoven) and, more recently, Advanced Technology Display (Bad Soden, Germany), but QMT is farther along the development trail.

QMT is focusing on the mobile-handset secondary display as its primary application, and the last time I looked the company had one handset design win, as well as one design win for a media player. Consistent with this strategy, the maximum size of display QMT is offering is 1.2 inches, with 128×96 "bichrome" pixels. So, QMT is actually selling product and has very aggressive sales projections, as will soon be reported in Insight Media’s new ePaper report.

Indeed, those sales projections are so aggressive that they raised my eyebrows. Has QMT lined up a lot of handset customers on the sly, or has the marketing department been drinking too much of the corporate Kool-aid?

On Tuesday, I received some evidence favoring the first of those possibilities. QMT and Cheng Uei Precision Industry Co. (Foxlink) announced an agreement to establish a new fab dedicated to the manufacturing QMT’s next generation of mirasol displays. The plant, which is to be fully operational in 2009, is intended to increase efficiency, reduce costs and improve agility. As part of the announcement, Jim Cathey, QMT’s VP of business development, said, "We have seen a strong response to mirasol displays and have made significant traction in the last year."

Foxlink is not a small company. It has a workforce of more than 43,000 employees and operates more than 15 design manufacturing and sales sites worldwide. The company has created a new business unit to support production of mirasol displays.

It will take the appearance of some new mirasol-equipped telephones to convince me completely, but it looks like QMT has successfully identified a niche that doesn’t have an entrenched display technology already in place.