Samsung's Crowd Control and (Very) Pretty Pictures

Kudos to Samsung for its thoughtfully designed 55-in. OLED TV exhibit at this year's show. Of course, it would be hard to make a 55-in. OLED TV look bad, but what was great about this setup was how Samsung showed three of the panels in three different implementations, and also controlled the flow of onlookers – it can be difficult to get a good look at a popular product like this on the show floor.

As shown in the picture below, the viewing queue (helpfully delineated with arrows on the floor), moved behind a roped-off area from the dual-view (at right), to the 2D view (middle) and finally to the 3D view (left). Friendly attendants stood by to answer questions – or perhaps to wake you up in case you ended up transfixed by the more-luscious-than-life imagery on the screens.

The dual-view implementation allows two viewers to watch--and hear--completely different content on the same screen. Both 2D and 3D views were spectacular. --Jenny Donelan, Information Display

LG Shows 4.5-inch AS3D Mobile Display Using Eye-Tracking

Beyond the groundbreaking 55-inch AMOLED TV shown in the LG booth, the company is also featuring a new 4.5-inch AS-3D display that uses eye tracking to deliver what it calls Viewing Angle Free 3D. Panel brightness/ resolution is 500cd/m2 /720 x 1280 in 2D and the display also delivers a 220 cd/m2 at 720 x 640 pixel image in AS-3D mode. The display prototype comes in a package with a camera mounted for eye-tracking /face detection, which LG Vice President BK Kim, head of the IT Mobile Development group, told us has less than 0.5% cross talk (center) and offers a viewing angle of 48-degrees in both h and v directions at a viewing distance of 30 to 35 cm.

Beyond this proof-of-concept prototype, the group plans to develop a 7- to 10-inch commercial display to target AS3D for the tablet market. Games are a natural fit, and the booth demo featured a compelling 3D game view that really showed off the technology. – Steve Sechrist

Qualcomm Shows mirasol HD Color Display

At Display Week this year, Qualcomm showed off its latest mirasol display prototype, a ground breaking 4.3-inch module in 1280 x 720 (HD) resolution with a 343 ppi (retinal-class) display capable of full motion video (30Hz.)

mirasol’s director of engineering, Pavan Mulabagal told us the prototype device will be sampling soon to select OEM customers looking for color, outdoor readability, always-on functionality in a “green” package.

The high-density pixel configuration is in-line with the current trends moving toward retinal-class displays, found in just about all mobile display devices going forward. That, coupled with inherent low power and full motion video support, make the mirasol reflective technology “a perfect fit for the move to color e-book readers," Mulabagal noted.

The mirasol display technology took the Display of the Year Silver Award at Display Week for recognition of its bright sunlight readability and low battery power requirements. Qualcomm also recently made the MIT Technology Review’s 2012 TR50 List for commercial innovations most likely to change lives around the world. mirasol’s marketing director Elisabeth Eller told us that with commercial products using the Mmirasol display already shipping in Asia, the launch of this HD prototype brings the company to a key milestone in its march toward bringing this low-power, daylight readable display to the mainstream. – Steve Sechrist

Roll Up for Corning’s New Willow Glass

Corning is showing off its new Willow glass at SID DisplayWeek 2012. The glass is similar to the company’s familiar Eagle glass that is used as substrates for LCD panels and other display applications. The big difference is that Willow is thin: really thin. It is just 100 microns thick, which is about the same as a sheet of paper.

The glass is produced using Corning’s fusion method, which gives it the smooth surface and uniform thickness that makes other Corning glass so well-suited for flat-panel display production. The fact that the glass is so thin, however, means that it can be bent without breaking. It also is much lighter than the thicker versions. The result is a glass that can be rolled up on spools, and that is light enough to make it practical to ship to customers around the world. Corning is making Willow glass in its Kentucky plant. The glass can be made up to 1 meter wide, and up to 300 meters can fit on a single spool.



While the glass can be used as sheets in traditional batch processing, it can also be used in roll-to-roll production. This probably won’t be continuous processing in most cases, though some coatings could be applied this way. Instead, it will probably be used for “step and repeat” production, which still promises to be much more efficient that the current practice of batch processing individual sheets of substrate.

Willow glass also is a good barrier for air and water vapor, which makes it attractive as a layer to encapsulate thin-film solar cells as well as OLED displays. It also tolerates high temperature processes which would cause flexible plastic substrates to stretch, buckle, or melt. – Alfred Poor, HDTV

Exciting E-paper Papers

In terms of e-paper, unlike last year's Display Week, this year it is not as much about prototypes on the floor as as it is about the sessions. There are numerous papers showing major gains in reflective brightness and greatly improved color. Fuji presented -- and demonstrated at author interviews with a 3-4 deep crowd of people -- a multi-color particle electrophoretic display that showed dramatically improved color. The paper was given by Hiji-san of Fuji, whom we have seen present innovative e-paper technologies for numerous years at Display Week. CMY color generation seems to be gaining momentum (HP, Ricoh, and now Fuji.)

Some further e-paper excitement later this week: HP's late-news paper (Thursday 2:30, 52.4) on electrokinetic technology has a provocative title: "Ultra-Low-Power Reflective Display with World’s Best Color". This will be interesting because what they will present is a 3-layer display using oxide-TFTs. – Jason Heikenfeld

TouchTurns: A US-Based P-Cap Module Startup

TouchTurns, a nine-person projected-capacitive (p-cap) touch module startup in Santa Clara, CA, is going after a market that is without question currently underserved: commercial p-cap applications in the US. TouchTurns’ differentiation derives from several interesting aspects, as follows:

1. The particular sensor being exhibited by TouchTurns (in 3.5”, 5” and 7” sizes) uses a single layer of ITO without bridges or metal routing traces, yet it uses mutual capacitance, not self-capacitance. This is accomplished by running drive electrodes vertically down the sensor and forming individual sense pads in a column beside each drive electrode. This also allows the sensor to be borderless on three sides! The photo below shows a close-up of the FPC on the top edge of a 3.5-inch sensor; you can see from the trace pattern that there are 10 drive electrodes and 15 sense electrodes per drive electrode.







Photo by author

2. The sensor is built on a substrate of Corning’s 0.1 mm “Willow” glass, using laser ablation for patterning (no photolithography!). Laminating the sensor to a 0.5 mm cover-glass with 0.1 mm of OCA yields a total stackup of 0.7 mm. This is about the same thickness as a “sensor-on-lens” configuration, but without the yield issues of that configuration (which, from the rumors I’ve heard, are significant).

3. The sensor can be driven by popular p-cap controller ICs with TouchTurns custom firmware and sensor patterns. The resulting module specs appear to be in the ballpark of the Microsoft 8 Touch Logo (10 touches, <1 mm accuracy error, 12 mm minimum between fingers, ~100 Hz scan rate, etc.) – although meeting the Logo spec is typically unimportant in commercial applications.

4. TouchTurns has a complete prototype line in Santa Clara for quick-turn development builds, and an offshore partner (CN Innovations in Shenzhen) for low-cost mass production. The prototype line is capable of building a wide range of sensor architectures, as well as printing custom artwork on custom-shaped cover-glass.

These four aspects make TouchTurns highly competitive in a market that I believe will welcome it with open arms. You can find TouchTurns in the Corning booth (123), to the right of the big roll of Willow glass.-- Geoff Walker, Walker Mobile, LLC.

The I-Zone Rocks!

This year, SID DisplayWeek has added a refreshing new feature to the Exhibit Hall: the I-Zone. This is a special section that gives “researchers space to demonstrate their prototypes or other hardware demo units for 2 days free of charge.” The section was made possible through the sponsorship of E-Ink.

With fewer than two dozen tables, the I-Zone is a hotbed of innovation and enthusiasm. From clothing with embedded fiber optics that light up segmented displays to lenses made of liquid crystals that can be programmed to change their focus, there are many technology demonstrations that are likely to make you look twice.

One of my favorites was a demonstration by Citizen Holdings. A device that looked sort of like a table-top basketball backboard had a jumble of hardware where the net should have been. This device turned out to be a robotic combination of camera and projector. When you held out your hand, the camera would find it and the projector would display a control icon on the palm of your hand. Press the icon, and it would control the computer. For example, if a movie was playing on the attached computer, you could make it pause or play by touching the icon in your hand. Instead of projecting onto your hand, it could also project onto the table. You could tap the table twice to “summon” the control icons. They would be projected close to where you tapped.

This could be the precursor to a rich new user interface for television. Instead of having to make broad gestures, speak repetitive commands, or deal with a complex remote, this system could let you control the television system through a series of context-sensitive control displays. And if two or more people are watching, you can easily tell who has the attention of the controller by seeing where the icons are projected.

This clever demonstration was just one of many fascinating projects on display at the I-Zone.--Alfred Poor, HDTV