Notes: DisplaySearch Emerging Display Technologies Conference

The con­fer­ence room is packed this morn­ing with a lot more atten­dees com­pared to the last cou­ple of days. It is 9:40am and I’m jump­ing in the touch session.

N-trig was focus­ing on how we get mul­ti­touch to go main­stream: the answer is to make mul­ti­touch soft­ware main­stream where Apple has a head start due to the fact that the com­pany owns the entire eco-system of touch con­trol­ling the soft­ware, hard­ware and services.

NextWindow Windows 7 launches on October 22, 2009 and will enable mul­ti­touch. (I maybe unpop­u­lar with a lot of folks out there for my unfa­vor­able opin­ion of Windows 7: just because Windows 7 is bet­ter than Windows Vista does not make it a good OS. Microsoft should have con­tin­ued to improve Windows XP because SP3 was get­ting close to a very solid, fast, and capa­ble OS.) According to Geoff Walker, most OEMs have at least one touch-enabled prod­uct under devel­op­ment to work with Windows 7. About 70% will be AIOs (all-in-ones), 20% mon­i­tors and 10% will be note­book PCs. Unfortunately, none of the OEMs have a clear vision of what will drive demand for touch. Touch pen­e­tra­tion rates are key and fore­casts vary among many mar­ket research firms. DisplaySearch is fore­cast­ing a 3% pen­e­tra­tion rate for note­book PCs in 2009 and grow­ing to 4% in 2013. DisplaySearch is also fore­cast­ing a 2% pen­e­tra­tion rate in mon­i­tors and AIOs in 2009 increas­ing to 3% in 2013.

Applications are key to touch. Consumers must see appli­ca­tion func­tion­al­ity that pro­vide a value propo­si­tion that makes them open their wal­lets. Microsoft’s “Software Ecosystem Team” has made just five consumer-touch related announce­ments: Roxio, Corel, Nero, CyberLink & CeWe and all of these are media pro­grams (www.readyset7.com). A large num­ber of cur­rent appli­ca­tions don’t work smoothly with touch: they work but not smoothly.

Ergonomics Here is a quote from Rupert Goodwins: “The human arm isn’t designed to be held hor­i­zon­tally away from the body for any length of time while mak­ing tiny, pre­cise move­ments.” This shows that a touch-enabled dis­play will not be used for extended times. Reclining mon­i­tors and AIOs will help but that will require wider view­ing angles (IPS, PVA) that can lead to increased costs.

Cost The incre­men­tal cost for touch as a per­cent­age of the total device BOM with a $2/inch assump­tion in 2009: $150 mon­i­tor is about 30%, $300 lap­top is about 11% and a $400 AIO is about 11%.

Microsoft The qual­ity of Microsoft‘s touch imple­men­ta­tion in Windows 7 looks unusu­ally good so far. Microsoft’s abil­ity to mar­ket new OS capa­bil­i­ties at a suf­fi­ciently detailed level has not been a his­tor­i­cal strength. And this is not a good indi­ca­tion point­ing to a suc­cess­ful future for touch based on Windows 7.

Prediction The pen­e­tra­tion of touch will hit 25% of AIOs (1.3M units), 2% in note­book PCs (2.4M), and roughly 0% in mon­i­tors (0.1M) in 2009. This will increase to 40% AIOs (2.6M), 7% note­books (9.4M) and 1.1% mon­i­tors (1.6M). Geoff Walker’s assump­tions for these pre­dic­tions are that:

• Applications will begin to fully sup­port touch by the end of 2010.
• The cost per inch for touch will drop at typ­i­cal PC hard­ware rates.
• AIO sales will exceed most forecasts.

RPO Malcolm Thompson, Chairman and CEO of RPO, is talk­ing about a touch tech­nol­ogy called dig­i­tal wave­guide. Back in the 1970s when the graph­i­cal user inter­face was first devel­oped the folks at PARC was scratch­ing their heads fig­ur­ing out how to move about the pointer on the screen. Someone thought of a bril­liant idea: the mouse. More dis­cus­sions ensued and cen­tered around whether peo­ple will be using an odd thing called the mouse. Today, the key­board and mouse is used to manip­u­late the GUI that is on almost com­puter. We are on the cusp of another major tran­si­tion from the mouse to the fin­ger. Will we be able to make this tran­si­tion work? Human beings are very ver­sa­tile when we are dri­ven to do new things and we are very adaptable.

Superior Optical Properties The dig­i­tal wave­guide does not require an addi­tional layer of film or glass on top of the LCD. Applications that require supe­rior opti­cal prop­er­ties will ben­e­fit from enhanced con­trast and viewa­bil­ity such as auto­mo­tive. The opti­cal wave­guides pro­vide the spa­cial loca­tion of where the fin­ger is touching.

Scale Applying wave­guide touch tech­nol­ogy to larger sizes is eas­ily done by increas­ing the length of the two wave­guides and addi­tional LEDs and lenses. Roll-to-roll man­u­fac­tur­ing tech­nol­ogy is used to lower costs of man­u­fac­tur­ing applied to both small and large wave­guides. RPO is work­ing on reduc­ing the bezels on the dig­i­tal wave­guides and increas­ing sizes. Sizes are stan­dard­ized at 3-, 7-, 10.1- and 19-inch.

Stantum is a soft­ware and IP license pure-play com­pany that license to IC sup­pli­ers. There are many dif­fer­ent touch tech­nolo­gies that serve niche mar­kets. These tech­nol­ogy solu­tion groups include opti­cal & video pro­cess­ing, touch sens­ing and emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies. Touch sens­ing includes pro­jected capac­i­tive and voltage-driven matrix. Emerging tech­nolo­gies include in cell (resis­tive or capac­i­tive) and in pixel (pho­to­sen­sor). Optical & video pro­cess­ing include FTIR, IR and video track­ing. What is the killer app for touch? Is it watch­ing a dozen videos at the same time and being able to rotate them? Probably not. How about draw­ing with all ten fin­ger? Mmm… no. A touch notepad? Maybe. There are three pil­lars of usabil­ity: trans­parency (opti­cal trans­parency vs tac­tile trans­parency), respon­sive­ness (pre­ci­sion and veloc­ity) and trustworthiness.

Senseg Ville Makinen, CEO and Director of Technology of Senseg talked about touch feed­back. Touch will become how we inter­act with machines but there are some ele­ments that are lack­ing today: there is a lack of tex­ture and touch feed­back where the screen feels unre­spon­sive. It is also dif­fi­cult to intu­itively locate but­tons and other on-screen objects. Full pro­duc­tiv­ity enhance­ments are not real­ized because the focus becomes secur­ing input actions instead of the task at hand. Touch feed­back is impor­tant because it pro­vides imme­di­ate sat­is­fac­tion, reduces user effort and allows small object recog­ni­tion. The mechan­i­cal touch feed­back tech­nolo­gies being used are motors & sole­noids (rotat­ing, vibrat­ing: unbal­anced weight, lin­ear motors), peizos & other smart mate­ri­als (mate­ri­als that change their shape accord­ing to volt­age or cur­rent), and var­i­ous lab tech­nolo­gies such as active mem­branes, ultra­sound, MEMS devices, gal­vanic elec­tric stim­u­la­tion. All tech­nolo­gies are lim­ited and dif­fer­en­ti­ated by the feed­back effect type, noise dis­tor­tion, and mechan­i­cal con­struc­tion of the device.

E-Sense touch feed­back does not include mechan­i­cal move­ment. E-Sense cre­ates elec­tro­sta­tic pres­sure called a Coulomb force between the tis­sue on the fin­ger and the E-Sense surface.

• Modulated pres­sure cre­ates eas­ily con­trol­lable touch sensations.
• Field strengths are below those met in every­day sur­round­ing environment.

Rays & Sharks It is inter­est­ing to note that rays and sharks have this type of sens­ing capa­bil­ity. It is not a rum­bling but a real sen­sa­tion. The touch feed­back does not require a phys­i­cal con­tact. In most hap­tic feed­back imple­men­ta­tions the entire device pro­vides the feed­back. Not so with E-Sense: tac­tile sen­sa­tions are local­ized. Scaling to larger dis­play sizes are not lim­ited. In addi­tion the dis­play remains fully trans­par­ent, silent (almost fully) and device inte­gra­tion is sim­ple. I really think that Senseg has a spe­cial touch feed­back tech­nol­ogy. It is also very inter­est­ing to note that rays and sharks are already get­ting feed­back using this type of technology.

Electronic Paper Display

There are many dif­fer­ent types of elec­tronic paper dis­plays: elec­trophoretic, elec­trochromic, bi-stable LCD, MEMS, elec­trowet­ting, and oth­ers like tun­able pho­tonic ink. There are many appli­ca­tions too: ebooks, USB dri­ves, hand­helds, dis­play cards, mag­a­zines, elec­tronic shelf labels, pub­lic sig­nage, clothes, watches, etc. The advan­tages of epa­per dis­plays are:

• Save energy and paper with a long bat­tery life mak­ing them envi­ron­men­tally friendly
• More and more dig­i­tal con­tent is available
• Epaper dis­plays make a large amount of books and doc­u­ments portable, espe­cially attrac­tive for trav­el­ers and students
• Additional new func­tions: inter­ac­tive, wire­less, audio, change font size, dictionary
• Saves space (book­shelves, stor­age rooms) and also saves money in the long run
• Epaper dis­plays are easy to read, espe­cially in bright ambi­ent light
• Labor cost and time savings
• Differentiating prod­ucts

Challenges There are so many dif­fer­ent vari­eties. The sub­strate is also a major chal­lenge: rigid vs. flex­i­ble. Glass is usu­ally used for rigid epa­per dis­plays. For flex­i­ble appli­ca­tions there are plas­tic, metal foil (LG Display), fab­ric or paper (Acreo). Another chal­lenge is the elec­trode and here are some mate­ri­als that are being used: ITO, car­bon nan­otube, con­duc­tive poly­mer, metal wire films. For TFTs, a-Si and LTPS are mature tech­nolo­gies with new ones being devel­oped: organic TFT, oxide TFT, etc. There are many ways to man­u­fac­ture epa­per dis­plays: roll-to-roll and batch processes. A major chal­lenge for epa­per dis­plays is to move from greyscale to color. There are three main meth­ods to enable color on epa­per dis­plays: spa­cial color fil­ter on top of a mono­chrome dis­play, spa­tial color sub-pixels, and stack­ing of trans­par­ent color layers.

Forecast 22 mil­lion units for 2009 and 52 mil­lion in 2010. Touch pen­e­tra­tion will be about 8% in 2009 and will increase to 12% in 2010. It will take until 2017 before touch will pen­e­trate more than 50%. These are some of the fac­tors that would enhance suc­cess on epa­per display-based devices:

• A good dis­play, with rea­son­able size, good con­trast ratio at sun light, good res­o­lu­tion and fast response time
• Color dis­play is espe­cially crit­i­cal for the e-newspaper and e-magazine application
• Flexible dis­play: When the dis­play size is 10” or larger, weight and fragility of glass become cru­cial: plas­tic or stain­less steel sub­strates have potential
• Touch screen: I think this is a must-have fea­ture for epa­per dis­plays because we want to make notes and high­light our books.
• Long bat­tery life
• Wireless: Any elec­tronic read­ing device will require wire­less con­nec­tiv­ity to receive updated con­tent with­out being teth­ered to a computer.
• Content
• Price: I say $99 is the sweet spot.
• Available in brick-and-mortar stores
• Wide for­mat support
• Side light or front light: Some of us read books at light but maybe we can use the old model and have read­ing lights instead of hav­ing it inte­grated into the device adding addi­tional cost.
• Large mem­ory size
• Fast boot time: I don’t think it should be fast; it should be instant.

OLED

Forecast OLED rev­enues will grow to $7.1 bil­lion in 2016, up from $615M in 2008, with CAGR 36%. The main dis­play on the mobile phone showed strong growth recently and will con­tinue to cap­ture dom­i­nant share of OLED rev­enues with $2.8 bil­lion in 2016. TV will become the sec­ond largest rev­enue appli­ca­tion for OLED, at $2.2 bil­lion in 2016. This fore­cast seems to be overly opti­mistic regard­ing OLED, espe­cially OLED TVs, with many indus­try ana­lysts expect­ing slow eco­nomic growth in major mar­kets such as North America and Western Europe for the fore­see­able future. There is cur­rently a sin­gle OLED TV on the mar­ket (Sony’s 11-inch XEL-1) with just one more com­ing to mar­ket later this year (LG’s 15-inch OLED TV). I am actu­ally quite a bit more bull­ish on OLED dis­plays on smart­phones with Samsung trail­blaz­ing this market.

Qualcomm spoke about its Mirasol dis­play based on MEMS tech­nol­ogy. MEMS Research & Innovation Center is located in San Jose, CA where all the R&D is being con­ducted. The man­u­fac­tur­ing is done in Taiwan at the Longtan Science Park: Gen. 4.5 fab that is 100% ded­i­cated to pro­duc­ing Mirasol dis­plays. The Mirasol dis­play works by reflect­ing light so light inter­feres to cre­ate color. The phe­nom­e­non that makes a butterfly’s wings shim­mer is the same prin­ci­ple mim­ic­ked in Mirasol dis­plays. The Mirasol dis­plays reflect ambi­ent light so that spe­cific wave­lengths inter­fere with each other to select color. As a mechan­i­cal device, the mir­ror actu­ates due to an applied volt­age, with a response time of 10-15 usec, fast enough to sup­port video appli­ca­tions. In the last 12 months there have been 10 design wins and a col­lab­o­ra­tion with LG who will develop Mirasol dis­play  enabled hand­sets. Color is com­ing and Qualcomm has been show­ing off its 2.2-inch Mirasol color dis­play demo and at SID there was a 5-inch color Mirasol dis­play demo. Why is low-power con­sump­tion on mobile phones impor­tant? With con­ver­gence the power con­sump­tion increases expo­nen­tially but the power sup­ply can­not and does not catch up. The color Mirasol dis­play con­sumes just 1mW.

E Ink Sriram Peruvemba, VP of Marketing at E Ink, spoke about trends in the epa­per mar­ket. There are now more than 45 ebook mod­els world­wide. Epaper tech­nol­ogy must mimic paper as much as pos­si­ble to increase the poten­tial to replace a 500 year old tech­nol­ogy. The most impor­tant fac­tor to enable suc­cess in the epa­per dis­play mar­ket is the price. Other fac­tors include: high con­trast, reflec­tive, no eye strain, low power, thin & light, sun­light read­able, reli­a­bil­ity, dura­bil­ity, cus­tom inter­faces, abil­ity to add fea­tures, color, etc. E Ink’s cus­tomers include Sony, Cybook, Amazon, Elonex, txtr, Slick, Onyx, Astak, iRex, Neolux, etc. The killer app for ebook read­ers will be elec­tronic text­books. There are over 100 mil­lion post-secondary stu­dents world­wide and the aver­age stu­dent spends US$650 on text­books each year. Currently there are on-going tri­als at sev­eral uni­ver­si­ties and those from BRIC coun­tries may lead the world. Color elec­trophoretic dis­plays are a real­ity and will enable etext­book appli­ca­tions. Prototypes were shown at SID in June with mass pro­duc­tion expected by the end of 2010.

Liquavista talked about elec­trowet­ting dis­plays for ereader and other appli­ca­tions. Electrowetting makes use of hydropho­bic and hydrophilic prop­er­ties to con­trol light. Liquavista’s fea­tures include high bright­ness, low power, paper-like, video switch­ing, low cost and scal­a­bil­ity enables it to be posi­tioned very well to take advan­tage of the grow­ing ebook reader marketplace.

Pixtronix‘s Mark Halfman, VP of Marketing & Business Development, focused on smart­phones. Smartphones are expected to grow to 300 mil­lion units in 2013 and mobile TV sub­scribers will hit 472 mil­lion in 2013. The dis­plays will increase in size, res­o­lu­tion, bright­ness and power con­sump­tion. The dis­play con­sumes roughly 50% of the smartphone’s over­all power con­sump­tion. Smartphones will enable email, ebook read­ing, Internet access, GPS, video play­back, etc. requir­ing a con­sid­er­able increase in power. The com­pany is devel­op­ing a MEMS technology-based low-power dis­play with excep­tional video image qual­ity with sim­ple man­u­fac­tur­ing using exist­ing TFT pro­duc­tion meth­ods. Some spec­i­fi­ca­tions include:

• Color gamut: 115% NTSC
• Contrast Ratio: 1000:1
• Viewing Angles: 170/170
• Color Depth: 24-bit
• Motion Blur: None
• Power Consumption: 75% reduc­tion com­pared to LCD

Color fil­ters and polar­iz­ers are elim­i­nated from the LCD improv­ing light trans­mis­siv­ity, which in turn requires very lit­tle power to gen­er­ate light. Liquid crys­tals are also replaced with a dig­i­tal MEMS shut­ter to fur­ther increase light trans­mis­siv­ity. Pixtronics show­cased a 2-inch QVGA (320 x 240) dis­play pro­to­type dur­ing SID 2009.

Corning‘s Jill Van Dewoestine talked about thin glass sub­strates cre­at­ing value for LCDs and epa­per dis­plays. Corning will be intro­duc­ing a flex­i­ble glass in the future. For note­book PCs the lighter the bet­ter and lighter LCDs can help achieve lighter sets: the lower the weight of a note­book PC, the higher the price so there is a direct cor­re­la­tion in terms of value. A 0.35 13.3-inch glass sub­strate weighs just 70g com­pared to 139g using a 0.5t or 175g for a 0.63t. Switching to thin­ner LCD glass is much more cost effec­tive than panel thin­ning such as etch­ing or pol­ish­ing. There is also a decline in yields with etch­ing or pol­ish­ing. ROI will be in about 9 months of adopt­ing a thing glass. 0.4t glass vol­ume ship­ments will start in Q4’09 and 0.3t is cur­rently being inves­ti­gated through the end of 2009 and vol­ume ship­ments is expected to begin in 2010. There is lim­ited sam­ple quan­ti­ties avail­able now for 0.3t glass. As an epa­per dis­play front­plane sub­strate, glass pro­vides improve­ments over poly­mer films. Why glass? There is dimen­sional sta­bil­ity sup­ports high-quality color with bet­ter aper­ture ratio and improve life­time and reli­a­bil­ity com­pared to plas­tic or other mate­ri­als. With glass you get bet­ter ther­mal capa­bil­ity that sup­ports color and high bright­ness lead­ing to bet­ter opti­cal qual­ity of TCOs. Glass also has bet­ter bar­rier prop­er­ties that sup­port con­sis­tent, long-lifetime per­for­mance with reduced mois­ture and oxy­gen expo­sure, chem­i­cal and UV blocking.