Sony has confirmed that it will officially abandon plans to purchase a plant and equipment to develop its Field Emission Display (FED) technology, because it couldn’t locate funding for the equipment, sounding the death knell for the alternative display technology. In 2006 Sony took a 37.8% stake in Field Emission Technologies (FET) after spinning out the technology it no longer wanted to develop inside Sony labs.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

FET planned to complete development and release a commercial 26-inch TV by the end of this year-but that is not to be, and Sony reportedly has already started liquidating its remaining FED assets.

Back in September-08 we reported (in Large Display Report p. 28.) that the company had plans to acquire Pioneer’s Kagoshima plant by the end of 2008 and install $183M to $274M in Gen-4 manufacturing equipment. The company was to use a Gen-4 (730 x 920 mm) substrate to accommodate 26-inch panels fabricated "two-up," and process 5K substrates per month. But again, financial issues delayed this plan with the announcement coming from Sony in November-08. "Things are not going as originally planned. We are going to have to review our plans and consider other financing options," a Sony spokesperson said late last year.

The FET team targeted the high-end reference monitor market, the "master" monitors used by TV broadcasters to evaluate picture quality and "tune" colors. The company said that neither LCDs nor plasma displays can satisfy the high quality standards required for such monitors but as Ken Werner pointed out back in September, "That conclusion might surprise Sony’s Professional Division, which is energetically promoting and widely distributing its BVM-L230 23-inch Professional Master LCD Monitor, at an MSRP of $25,000." And as Pete Putman pointed out in his March 30th Display Daily, "A $25K LCD monitor is a tough sell these days in the broadcasting business."

The technology itself is superior to LCD in many ways, particularly the high contrast levels and very fast response times. FED depends on the light emitted from electrons striking colored phosphor, the same principle as PDP and the display bench mark standard for half a century, CRTs. This emissive approach to displays is one of OLED’s biggest advantages too, and it is an order of magnitude faster.

Proponents say FETs should also be cheaper to manufacture with fewer total components, and be more power efficient than rival LCD technology. At CEATEC-07 bright screen demonstrations were given by FET showing the FED panels drawing 14 watts to the LCD’s +100 watts. While the LCD technology has come a long way since late 2007, they still rely on a relatively inefficient, back lighting scheme, and complex active matrix addressing, not required in FEDs.

So Perhaps Tom Woolf said it best in his book The Right Stuff, that pointed to technology funding that makes the difference, "No bucks, no Buck Rogers." And in the display industry, LCD got most of the bucks. Had things been different and even 1% of the multiple billions of capex dollars that went into successive LCD fabs been diverted to FED development, we may not be printing this obituary to FED technology today. In the end, it was perhaps the dramatic investment in mainline flat panel displays that rendered FED technology unable to compete, against the LCD manufacturing juggernaut. - SS

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