SID ’05 Late News Press Advisory

Contact: Dian Mecca
SID Press Relations Office
Phone 203/853-7069
dmecca@nutmegconsultants.com

Not written for publication

SID ’05: Last-Minute Updates and Factoids as of 5/16/05

What headlines do you hope to write at SID ’05? Do they contain the words “World’s Largest LCD-TV,” “Cell-phone Television,” “Projection TV Challenges Plasma,” or “Taiwan Challenges Korea in LCD Production?” Are you interested in the coming revolution in LED backlighting for large LCDs, or the explosion in OLED displays? Would you like a story about the challenges MIT Media Lab founder and high-tech investor Nicholas Negroponte will present in his just-announced luncheon address to those attending the new SID ‘05 Investor’s Conference?

If your stories center around interviews with senior corporate executives, SID ’05 is where the world’s display-industry executives come to you. Whatever stories appeal to you, your editors, and your readers, we’ll help you find them at SID ’05.

Useful Information

SID 2005, The Society for Information Display International Symposium, Seminar and Exhibition, will be held May 22-27 at the Hynes Convention Center, Boston, Massachusetts. The Sheraton Boston, adjacent to the convention center, is the headquarters hotel.

The Press Rooms are Rooms 101 and 102 in the convention center. There will be phone, fax/printer, and Internet service. The Press Room will be open Monday through Wednesday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm, and Thursday 9:00 am – 2:00 pm. All press registrations will be taken care of in the Press Room. If you are pre-registered and have received your press credentials by mail, you can pick up your badge holder there; if you’re not pre-registered, Dian Mecca will register you. Dian will be supervising the press rooms and supporting the press corps.

The annual Press Breakfast will be held Tuesday, May 24, in room Fairfax A at the Sheraton Boston at 7:00 am, just prior to the Keynote Session and the opening of the exhibits. We will feed you. Ken Werner (Nutmeg Consultants) will provide a brief overview of current display issues. Barry Young (DisplaySearch) will review display markets and provide market forecasts. Then, we will quickly walk you through the major events, product introductions, and hot stories that will be coming your way during Display Week; and we will give you the chance to fire questions at our tableful of industry experts, including Barry Young, Chris Chinnock (Insight Media), Ray Soneira (DisplayMate), Brian Berkeley (Samsung Electronics), David Mentley (Editor, Forbes Display Technology Investor), and Keynote Speakers Harold Hoskens (Philips Mobile Display Systems) and Jean-Louis Bories (National Semiconductor).

The Press Breakfast will conclude in time for all of us to make the short walk to Ballrooms A and B at the Convention Center for the Keynote Session at 8:30 am. The keynotes are:

• LCD Revolution – The Third Wave (Sang Wan Lee, President and CEO, Samsung Electronics)
• A Global Perspective on the Future of Mobile Displays for Use in Cellular Telephones... (Harold Hoskens, SVP and GM, Philips Mobile Display Systems)
• From the Shadows to Center Stage: The Emergence of Electronics as the Dominant Arena for Display Innovation (Jean-Louis Bories, SVP and GM, Displays and Wireless Group, National Semiconductor).

What’s New?

The SID Display Business Conference, which drew over 700 people last year, has been expanded to two days – Monday and Tuesday – this year, and is being held in Ballroom C at the Hynes. For more information, go to http://www.sid.org/conf/sid2005/bc.html. In addition there is a new Investor’s Conference on Wednesday, May 25. The two events together are being called the “SID Business Enterprise.” Speakers include leading display-industry executives from Asia and the U.S. Press get in free.

The winners of the SID/Information Display magazine Tenth Annual Display of the Year Awards (DYA), the industry’s major awards, will be revealed at the end of the Keynote Session at 10:15 am on Tuesday in Ballrooms A and B in the Convention Center. (You don’t even have to leave your chairs.) This is a significant change from past years, when the DYA were announced in the December issue of Information Display. That made the actual presentations in May just a little anti-climactic. This year, the drama is back! Senior executives from the winning companies, which span three continents, will be there to accept their awards. Gold Award winners will make short presentations. Press get in free.

Finally, the technical program has been expanded from three to four days, with the program now running through Friday morning. Aware that some attendees might not have the fortitude to make it to the end of the week, the organizers have scheduled some of their most interesting papers for Friday, including two particularly significant Applications Tutorials: Pete Putman’s Digital Television and HDTV: What’s It All About? and Brad Lizotte’s Backlighting Technology Overview: What Technology Do I Choose?

Late News

Osram is sponsoring a Press Luncheon in Press Room 102 at 12:45 pm on Tuesday. The subject will be LED backlighting for large liquid-crystal displays, one of this year’s hot topics. And Corning Display Technologies wants to buy you breakfast on Wednesday at 8:00 am, also in Room 102. Corning is feverishly adding display-glass capacity to keep up with the boom in flat-panel-display manufacturing, and the Corning execs probably want to talk about the unit’s high-growth future. They may not want to tell you that all of their Asian customers are busy squeezing them on price, but you can ask that question.

Blocks of 15-minute press conferences will be held in Press Room 101 on Tuesday from 11:15 am to 12:30 pm, and two more press conferences will be held on Wednesday at 9:30 am and 11:00 am. The presenting companies (so far) are Edge Electronics, SiPix Imaging, LG.Philips LCD, EarthLCD, Nemoptic, and Vitex Systems. As always, Dian will make sure the conferences run on time. A full and updated schedule of press conferences will be presented at the Tuesday Press Breakfast and will be available in the Press Room.

MIT Media Lab founder and high-tech investor Nicholas Negroponte will be the luncheon speaker at the Investor’s Conference on Wednesday, May 25. Negroponte is often controversial, and his advice to the investment community may well be pungent. The speaker at the Wednesday Luncheon will be Jonathan Winawer from MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He will tell us that we can’t necessarily believe what we see on a display in “Is Seeing Believing? Illusions and Lightness Perception from Helmholtz to the 21st Century.” Your Press Badge will not get you into the luncheon, but Dian has a limited number of tickets for the first few people who are interested.

The Show Floor

Show management estimates there will be close to 500 exhibit booths at SID 2005. As usual, the SID Show will be the largest show in North America devoted to display technology, products, components, electronics, manufacturing, and applications. Here’s a small taste of what you’ll see on the show floor.

California Micro Devices will have the first public showing of its PhotonIC CM4600 single-chip LED drivers, which support both the main and sub-display backlight LED drivers, camera flash, and RGB LEDs for the latest multimedia wireless handsets. The high level of integration significantly reduces part count and saves space.

Endicott Research Group (ERG) will show its E200II and SE/SE2 Series inverters igniting a CCFL lamp while submerged in a tank of water to demonstrate its unique vacuum-encapsulated inverter design that produces reliable CCF lamp ignition in harsh environments. Booth 2022.

Fraunhofer Institut Photonische Microsysteme (IPMS) will demonstrate a VGA laser-projection display that is the size of two sugar cubes. It uses a 2D micro-scanning mirror that scans the frames using a Lissajous pattern instead of parallel scan lines. The miniature projector could be used in mobile phones and other portable devices.

Optrex will exhibit its broad range of flat-panel displays for industrial, mobile, and automotive applications, including a bright new 12.1-inch TFT-LCD with SVGA resolution and an exceptional luminance of 1000 nits. There will also be new OLED displays and automotive instrument panels using both LCDs and LEDs.

OSRAM will be the first company to unveil an 82-inch (nearly 7-foot) LED backlight module, featuring 1120 LEDs – 280 red, 560 green, and 280 blue. The company will also show its P-VIP Super High Performance Projection Lamp for microdisplay projection systems that require their light to be produced in a very small volume. If you design microdisplay projection systems, this is a big deal. The bulbs come with power ratings up to 300 watts, and they have new electronic drivers with user-defined software and contrast-enhancement technology.

Go up to an ATM with a sledge hammer and take a good swing at the display. Well, maybe you shouldn’t do that. But if you do and the display doesn’t break, it may be because a sheet of White Electronic Designs’ Max-Vu glass has been laminated to the front of the display. Max-Vu improves contrast and viewability of AMLCDs, while at the same time offering protection from harsh environmental conditions. Booth 2103.

British company Zytronic will be introducing its latest projected-capacitive technology (PCT) touch screen, ZYPOS. PCT provides a “touch” screen without the touch, since the technology senses your finger or stylus when it’s still well above the screen. Zytronic’s intention for ZYPOS is that it will bring PCT to mass markets such as retail and gaming at a lower price point than has been available before. Booth 1323.

In addition to its broad range of industrial displays, Global Display Solutions (GDS) will be showing its innovative backlight inverters using new piezoelectric transformers instead of the traditional transformers made from wire coils. Designed for use in multi-lamp backlight systems such as LCD-TVs, the “Piezo Inverter” produces balanced output that gives exceptional uniformity and dimming performance, says GDS. The company goes on to say that the technology offers improved reliability, safety, and EMI performance because of reduced overall size and lower component count. Booth 701.

For many years, Joel Pollack was a very effective presence at SID Symposia for Sharp Microelectronics of the Americas, for which he was VP. Now, he is President and CEO of Clairvoyante, which has developed several technologies for making cell-phone and other small displays look sharper than you would think possible. Pollack predicts a paradigm shift toward the specification of “visual resolution” rather than number of pixels in the display. In Booth 1412, Clairvoyante will demonstrate how adding a white (W) sub-pixel to the usual red, green, and blue (RGB), and using sub-pixel rendering technologies, can achieve the same visual resolution as traditional displays “without the power and brightness shortcomings of RGB stripe.”

At Booth 1325, GE Advanced Materials will be showing its Illuminex LCD diffuser films, which use “some very interesting technology.” For those of you without an all-consuming interest in diffuser films for flat-panel displays, this could still be interesting as an initial GE thrust into the lucrative optical-enhancement-film business dominated by traditional rival 3M(Booth 1601).

Water and oxygen are great for people but deadly for OLEDs. Vitex Systems makes a sophisticated multi-layer barrier for protecting OLEDs from these killers. The company has sent us a teaser saying it will make an announcement at SID ’05 “involving one of today’s leading OLED display makers.” During its 11:00 am press conference on Wednesday, the company “will report a major milestone surrounding its proprietary Barix thin-film barrier encapsulation technology.”

Philips Mobile Display Solutions will be exhibiting its CloseView mobile display technology that enables handset makers to significantly reduce the size and thickness of mobile phones and improve front-of-screen performance. So what is CloseView? We’ll have to talk to the folks at MDS to find out. Philips will also be integrating Immersion Corporation’s “haptic touch feedback technology” into Philips’ TFT-LCD touch screens for the automotive market. The idea of having a soft button vibrate under your fingertip to tell you that a function has been actuated may not seem like a particularly exciting or necessary addition to a touch display – until you try it. Hopefully, MDS will have demonstrators.

That leaves another 210 or so exhibitors for you to explore on your own, but we’ll give you some additional tips and more details at the Tuesday morning Press Breakfast. We look forward to seeing you in Boston.

Ken Werner and Dian Mecca
SID Press Relations Office • Operated by Nutmeg Consultants