If you happened to miss the opening day of the SID Business Conference on Monday, it was one for the books. This part of the SID conference comes before the official opening of the show, but always manages to deliver a great prelude for this nuts and bolts level technology symposium rife with the kind of details that only an engineer could love. For example, interested in single-layer Al-Ni-La-Si interconnections for source and drain of LTPS-TFT LCDs using direct contacts with both ITO and Poly-Si? - We’ve got you covered this Wednesday in session 24.2 in the Array Manufacturing Processes track–you get the point.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

By comparison, the Business Conference is a bit less esoteric with down to earth presentations, like the kick-off talk on "OLED From Hype to Business" by Gildas Sorin of Novaled. Sorin gave a great overview of the state of OLED starting with an amusing set of slides: "The good news is OLED business is just one year away" making the point, "We’ve been saying this for the past several years… it’s coming next year." He went on to say, "The good news is that we won’t be saying this next year." Here’s why.

Sorin described an "OLED soup" with a slide showing the conjunction of "success parameters" required for the OLED business to be successful. These included: Performance (showing power efficiency is on the right track.) Lifetime (linked to performance and stating blue materials have reached commercial levels.) Platform (cooperation among vendors on OLED platform development was a sign of maturity.) Critical Mass (with eight key players and showing OLED’s focus in both the lighting and display industries.) and Cost (showing the lower cost potential in manufacturing and much lower component count of OLED over LCD.) Finally, he made a bold statement that "OLED is an LCD Device" with the point that OLED manufacturing can leverage up to 70% of the AM-TFT manufacturing process.

The session also gave us a multitude of market research briefings from some of the top leaders in the field including:

• DisplayBank’s Kenny Kim with his "Global Display Market Dynamics."
• iSuppli’s Paul Semenza delivered a talk on "The TV Market and its Impact on the Display Business" that included an excellent review of their recent consumer market survey featuring brands by tier (i.e. Sony vs Vizio) and buying influencers (like display quality over price).
• Chris Connery of DisplaySearch talked on Large Format Digital Signage, calling it the next market where most large (gen 10) displays will be sold.
• Steve Marsland of McLaughlin Group showed the managers in the crowd just how the market values new display features, and how to price them to optimize revenue based on time and the market’s perception of inherent risk.
• Bill Cogshall targeted pico projectors, with a presentation on "The Bright Light in the Front Projector Display Business"

My personal favorite for the day was, "Display Technology Forecast for Wireless Applications" by Michael Lebby from the Optoelectronics Industry Development Assoc. (Washington DC; www.oida.org). A participant best described his talk during the Q&A session as a "fire hose of information." True, the talk was a full press data dump (thank God for notes) and remarkably useful. Each slide contained a take-away statement at the bottom that served to build continuity and position the viewer for the next bit in the procession of logic. Well done!

The presentation looked to define the future lifestyle of consumers 10 years out based on what we know today, and connecting the dots along the way. Lebby said displays are enabling the wireless revolution, including high-bright LEDs, OLEDs, lasers, and cameras. He sees cameras as "camera communicators" that will become "THE" platform with 500M sold by 2010. Selling points for mobile devices are shifting from hardware features to usability, coolness, applications availability, internet, with the trend toward sharing more photonics, images etc. tracking the lumen/pound in LED/laser projectors concluding they will eventually weigh ounces with display size measured in feet. He asserted that "Images are Data" with the idea that activated smart codes (3D bar codes) on static displays, link users directly to advertisers web sites. OLEDs become wearable wireless displays-by way of fashion that will lead to networked, illuminated, OLED clothing, where wearing light or shared images may become trendy.

To really get at the heart of future product development, Lebby said we need to imagine our lifestyle in 10 years, focus on the needs and look where the technology roadmaps fall short, and begin to fill the gaps. And here at SID we’ll be doing it all week.

(Note: Look for a complete review of the SID Business Conference in the next Large Display and Mobile Display Reports)

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