June 2005

news archive

SID 2005 "Best Buzz" Awards Announced by Insight Media
by Steve Sechrist

June 9 - Today, Insight Media announced the winners of its "Best Buzz" awards for the SID 2005 Symposium and Exhibition. The Best Buzz awards are selected by polling Insight Media staff, analysts, press, and conference attendees about what was new and exciting to them. They reflect what people were talking about most at the show and what we were asked most about. The awards do not necessarily represent excellence in technical performance, but are a reflection of the "buzz" or noise the products created. The Best Buzz awards honors the "must-see" products or technologies at the show. Top honors for "Best Buzz" at SID 2005 go to:

Best Overall in Show

Samsung Electronics 40-inch Active-matrix OLED Display

This 1280 x 800 WXGA OLED was the largest OLED TV ever produced driven by an amorphous silicon (a-Si) active-matrix backplane, enabling faster video response times with low power consumption. It was manufactured on Samsung's fourth-generation (4G) production line with a mother-glass size of 730 x 920mm. Most impressive was that the new OLED prototype combines all of the traditional features of emissive OLED technology with the production infrastructure advantages of standard a-Si techniques.

The prototype OLED panel features a maximum screen luminance of 600 nits; a black-and-white contrast ratio of 5000:1; and a color gamut of 80 percent. Samsung also said the ultra-thin shape of the panels will allow TV set designers to create televisions with a total thickness of 3 cm (1.2 inches) or less.

Best New Display Technology

Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Company's 32-inch WXGA LCD-TV using OCB Mode Low-temperature p-Si TFT and Blinking Backlight

This 1366 x 768 wide-format LCD used a pseudo-impulse driving method and backlight blinking to achieve a high performance (less-than-5-ms response-time) display with over 600:1 contrast at 600 cd/m² luminance. The company said the panel was the largest low-temperature p-Si shown in the US and is currently being ramped for production in Japan as a premium LCD-TV for the domestic market. There was a supporting paper covering the technology at SID (Paper 9.3) presented by Kazuhiro Nishiyama of TMD Japan.

Best Backlight Technology

Philips Research Multi-spectral Backlight

Philips spectrum-sequential backlight system for LCD panels reached a color gamut of 130 percent using a modulation method on two different types of hot-cathode florescent lamps providing the backlighting for a six-primary-color display. Different phosphors in the lamps resulted in different primaries, ensuring high good color saturation.

Runner-up

Osram 82-inch LED Backlight Module

An 82-inch mercury-free and lead-free LED backlight module capable of generating a color gamut that exceeds NTSC requirements by 50 percent. The 10,000-nit module uses 1120 (280 red, 560 green, and 280 blue) next-generation OSRAM Golden DRAGON LEDs. It is 40 mm deep, consumes 1100 watts, and operates in a temperature range of -40 to +85 degrees. The backlight module was only mildly warm to the touch after being on for a full day on the show floor.

Best 3D Technology

Philips 3D Solution including a Passive 3D Lenticular LCD with IC3D Signal Processor and Software

This "solution" really is one: It consists of a 42-inch 3D LCD monitor (passive), an IC3D display chip for 3D signal processing, and decoder software for real-time rendering and interweaving of depth information into 2D content to create a 3D image.
With this solution, the group has decoupled the 3D display from the content with an autostereoscopic (no glasses) system. The IC3D signal processor and software will visualize 3D data sets or 2D content that is converted for 3D. Annoying viewing zones were eliminated by angling the lenticular array - very clever.

Coolest Technology

Polymer Vision (Philips) Rollable displays

QVGA active-matrix rollable displays in two prototype devices, a "roll-up e-reader" and the "wrap e-reader" being positioned to OEMs as information-content display accessories for cell phones. The displays were based on an ultra-thin 25-micron plastic substrate combined with flexible organic electronics to form the active-matrix backplane.
With this technology, Polymer Vision has decoupled the display size from device size, allowing much larger, text-intensive displays to be incorporated in compact configurations.

Sales of Small and Medium Displays to Reach $21 Billion in 2005

Austin, Texas, June 9 - Revenue from sales of small and medium displays are projected to reach $21.3 billion in 2005, up 11 percent, according to the DisplaySearch Q2 '05 Flash Small/Medium Shipment Report, which has just been published. In Q1' 05, revenue for all small/medium applications was $5.0 billion, which was up 17 percent year-to-year and down only 4 percent quarter-to-quarter in what is traditionally a poor quarter. Shipments were 294.7 million units, down 3 percent quarter-to-quarter and up 22 percent year-to-year.

Performance by application is shown in Table 1:

Table 1: Q1'05 Application Shipments, Revenue and ASP

The report also reveals the display production in shipments, revenue, and ASP (by application, display technology, size, and resolution) for 38 of the panel manufacturers operating in this market. Table 2 shows that the leading supplier in terms of revenue over two quarters from Q4'04 to Q1'05 was Sharp, with Sanyo Epson, TMDisplay, and Samsung SDI showing strong performances.

Table 2: Small/Medium Revenue Share by Supplier

Radiant Imaging and Nichia Partner to Support LED Based Lighting Design

Duvall, Washington, June 3 - Radiant Imaging and Nichia Corporation have announced a partnership intended to support designers of LED-based lighting systems for applications such as signage, display backlights, automotive and aviation instrument panels, and traffic lights.

Specifically, Nichia has engaged Radiant Imaging to fully characterize the output of their most popular InGaAs LEDs by generating Radiant Source™ Models of these products. Nichia will also purchase a number of ProSource® software licenses from Radiant Imaging, along with the rights to resell or redistribute them, together with the Radiant Source™ Models of its products. Radiant Source™ Models are highly accurate software models that fully characterize a light source's angular and spatial luminance characteristics.

"LEDs are being used as the light source in increasingly sophisticated and complex display and illumination systems," notes Kevin Chittim, Radiant Imaging Vice President of Marketing & Sales. "The use of [computer models and design software] enables illumination designers to successfully tackle these problems, produce optimum designs, and also minimize time-to-market by accurately modeling system behavior in software, rather than having to rely on time-consuming prototype iterations," Chittim said.

Motorola Ventures Invests in Sonaptic, Developer of 3D Sound Technology for Mobile Devices

Chicago, Illinois and High Wycombe, UK, June 1 - Motorola, Inc. and Sonaptic Limited today jointly announced that Motorola has made a strategic minority investment in Sonaptic Limited. This forms part of the second round of investment in one of the leading developers of advanced audio technologies for the mobile device market.

Mobile devices incorporating the Sonaptic 3D Audio Engine creates an immersive, three-dimensional sound environment that can be experienced using the embedded speakers in portable devices or by using standard headphones, a statement issued jointly be the two companies said. The technology is suited to multiple applications including games, user-interface enhancement, music, and ring tones. Sonaptic's technology is portable and has been especially crafted for the low-power, low-resource requirements of the mobile device environment. It is ideally suited for use on mobile phones, personal video and music players, PDAs, and gaming platforms, both companies said.

"Our decision to invest in Sonaptic was motivated by its world-class technology and the ability to enhance the mobile end-user experience," said John O'Donohue, managing director of Motorola Ventures EMEA. "We also believe that Sonaptic will play a major role in the next generation of mobile handsets."

In addition to Motorola, the round included further investment from Pentech Ventures, and new investment from ROHM Inc., the leading Japanese semiconductor component manufacturer.

Sonaptic technology is based on more than 12 years of research by the company's founders, initially at EMI Music's Research Laboratories in the 1990s. With headquarters in High Wycombe, UK, and offices in Tokyo, Seoul, and Austin, Texas, Sonaptic has signed customer agreements that include the device manufacturers NEC, Fujitsu, and Mitsubishi, and semiconductor vendors ROHM and Yamaha.