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SID Display Week 2011: AMOLED, Touch, and 3D Provide Excitement

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The annual SID Display Week conference and exhibition (kicked off once again by the SID DisplaySearch Business Conference) in Los Angeles started in surprisingly cool and rainy conditions, but by the end of the show, attendees were enjoying California sunshine. The exhibition also offered some surprises, both for what was and for what was not there. Three of the things that stood out for us were AMOLED, touch on an e-book, and 3D.

AMOLED has been a hot topic in 2011, but the company with an overwhelming share of the market, Samsung Mobile Display, did not exhibit, and its sister company, Samsung Electronics, dedicated all of its non-LCD space to new technological investments. These new technologies included electrowetting displays developed by Liquavista (which Samsung acquired recently), pentile and other alternative architectures developed out of Samsung’s investment in Clairvoyante (now Nouvouyance), and a MEMS display produced using technology from Pixtronix, in which Samsung recently invested. LG Display, the other big display panel maker that exhibited at SID, focused on LCDs.

However, for those who looked a bit further, exciting AMOLED breakthroughs from Ignis, RiTdisplay, and Himax could be found. The companies demonstrated several 3.5”, HVGA, 200 nit AMOLED displays built on a-Si, rather than LTPS, TFT backplanes, using architectures developed by Ignis. The organic material deposition was done by RiTdisplay, on an a-Si TFT backplane manufactured by an unnamed Taiwanese TFT LCD maker. The driver chip was produced by Himax. If this technology can be brought into mass production, it could enable broader manufacturing of AMOLED since there are many more a-Si fabs than LTPS lines. This could also create a much-needed second source for AMOLEDs in smart phones and other applications.

Figure 1: Ignis a-Si TFT AMOLED Demo

Source: Ignis, photo by Jennifer Colegrove

Touch screens were very well-represented at SID, with numerous touch companies in nearly every display maker’s booth. One surprise came from Hanvon, the leading e-book reader company in China, who announced their new dual-touch electromagnetic resonance touch (ERT) technology at the SID DisplaySearch Business Conference. Hanvon stated that ERT can sense both finger touch and pen input. What makes it unique is that the sensors are located beneath an e-paper display (from E Ink Holdings)—there is no touch sensor in front of the display. Hanvon developed the ERT technology by adding several capacitors to a traditional digitizer touch sensor. Hanvon is planning to commercialize the ERT touch in its e-readers in the second half of this year, starting with the market in China.

Figure 2: Structure of Hanvon e-Reader with ERT for Both Pen and Finger Touch

Source: Hanvon

Figure 3: Illustration of Hanvon ERT Technology

Source: HanvonFinally, 3D continued as an area of technological competition, gaining a lot of attention at the show. Several different approaches were on display, from shutter glass to autostereoscopic systems. The breakthrough was RealD, which has become a leader in 3D systems for digital cinema using an active switching LCD and passive glasses. RealD has been working with Samsung to implement active switching LCD 3D technology, which is called RDZ 3D technology. This enables full resolution images with passive glasses, not the expensive and heavy active shutter glasses.

One aspect that RealD emphasized was their algorithms for removing ghosting artifacts (called ghostbusting) that resulted in an improved picture quality compared to the same unit in Samsung’s booth, which apparently did not have ghostbusting. RealD received a Best in Show award for its technology. However, the cost of producing the active switching LCD in volume is not yet clear.


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