February 2005

news archive

Fusion Optix, Inc. Receives $1.1 Million In Series A Funding

Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 31 - Fusion Optix, Inc. announced today closure on a Series A funding round totaling $1.1 million. The investment has been provided by a prominent group of independent private equity investors from Boston and Philadelphia. This investment follows a seed-funding round completed in April 2004 provided by the company's founders and Thomas Eagar, the Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Systems and Engineering at MIT. Professor Eagar also leads the Boston-based investment consortium and the company's Scientific Advisory Board.

The one-year-old firm has developed a new, patented optical technology that improves the visual performance of flat-panel displays, such as LCDs and emerging microdisplay-based rear-projection televisions, while lowering their overall bill of materials and assembly costs. Currently, the company has produced sample quantities of their initial products and is working with mainstream original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in North America and Asia to integrate this low-cost, advanced-materials technology into a variety of consumer and industrial products.

According to James Riley, a principal at the law firm Riley & Fanelli P.C. and a leader of the Philadelphia-based investment consortium, "Fusion Optix has attracted an incredibly talented management and engineering team. On their seed capital alone, they have demonstrated the ability to develop technology and to deliver evaluation quantities to world-class manufacturers, where they are currently being viewed in a very positive light."

Terry Yeo, Fusion Optix's CEO, said of the new funding round, "This welcomed funding will provide us with the resources necessary to deliver products…that provide enhancements to the visual performance of all flat-panel displays and reduce the cost of producing them."

Fusion Optix is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company has regional sales offices in Cambridge, UK and Soul, Korea.

Information: Patrick Lucci, Fusion Optix, Inc. Tel: (617) 480-1119, email: 
patrick.lucci@fusionoptix.com.

NEC MultiSync® LCD 70 Series Wins iF Product Design Award

Chicago, Illinois, February 1 - NEC-Mitsubishi Electronics Display of America, Inc., today announced that its latest line of LCD monitors - the NEC MultiSync® LCD 70 Series - has been awarded the iF Product Design Award 2005, one of the most coveted honors in product design.

Since 1954, the iF (Industrial Forum Design Hannover) has recognized companies and design studios for outstanding design-related products and services. Each year, competition for the award is intense.

"We are both honored and excited to win an IF Product Design Award 2005 for our NEC MultiSync LCD 70 Series," said Scott Hoaglund, Product Manager of NEC-Mitsubishi. "This honor is especially rewarding for us because it confirms what we originally intended to achieve with the 70 Series - to design an LCD monitor that not only delivers outstanding performance, but exceptional looks as well."

As a winner of an iF Product Design Award 2005, the NEC MultiSync 70 Series line becomes a finalist for an iF Gold Award. Gold Award winners will be announced on March 10, 2005, at the global technology show CeBIT in Hannover, Germany.

Launched on November 1, 2004, the NEC MultiSync 70 Series line is distinguished by a soft, rounded industrial thin-frame design. Ranging from 15 inches to 20 inches, the models in the 70 Series feature an adjustable-height stand and unobtrusive OSM® (On Screen Manager) control buttons located beneath the front bezel.

The NEC MultiSync LCD Series is NEC-Mitsubishi's flagship line of LCD displays and the successor to the company's popular 60 Series. While the 70 Series line retains the simple, symmetrical, thin-frame design made popular by the 60 Series, the units are differentiated by a subtle roundedness.

Introduction: www.necmitsubishi.com.

High-Efficiency P-OLED Materials Developed Under EU Program

Cambridge, United Kingdom, January 31 - Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) has announced that an EU-funded two-year program undertaken with display-industry partners has concluded with "outstanding success," according to the companies involved. The STEPLED project was undertaken with the aims of understanding the science that controls the spin states of polymer-based LEDs (P-OLEDs), which is critical to developing more power-efficient displays.

The project, carried out with partners Philips, Covion, and the universities of Cambridge, Bologna, and Mons, focused on establishing high-efficiency materials using high singlet-ratio fluorescent polymers - but also worked on solution- processable phosphorescent emitters - and made significant progress in both areas.

The project achieved the production of a standard two-layer device structure with an external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 6 percent. This has been described as "outstanding," being almost twice the efficiency of previous materials. The impressive performance was achieved using red-emitting polymers, typically the least efficient color in RGB displays.

Says Alan Mosley, EU Auditor for the project, "The efficiency achieved appears to represent a 'state of the art' [for red materials]. When this is coupled with the simplicity of the device structure, it represents a significant achievement."

CDT's Scott Brown, VP Research and Technology agrees. "We have gained a great deal of fundamental knowledge from this project, which should increase the rate at which solution-processable P-OLED materials are adopted, and increase the scope of their application. In this project, and in other work, we have been able to prove that singlet-triplet ratios in organic polymers can be very much higher than the 25 percent previously believed to be the theoretical maximum. This opens the door to very high-efficiency, fluorescent, solution-processable P-OLEDs."

Information: www.cdtltd.co.uk.