Society for Information Display News Stories January 2002

Seoul, Korea, January 29 - The Second International Display Manufacturing Conference and Exhibition (IDMC 2002) opened here today at the Sheraton Walker Hill Hotel with three strong messages. First, in his opening address, Aris Silzars, President of the Society for Information Display, delivered the message that the future of large displays is all about manufacturing cost. Among the points Silzars made is that 700 raster lines (or rows of pixels) is good enough for high-quality, large-screen home television using either HDTV or EDTV, and that all of the major display technologies that are candidates for large-screen TV can display this resolution and produce images that are more than good enough for the application. So, Silzars said, "if all display technologies can produce displays that are 'good enough,' selection of technologies based on their manufacturing cost potential becomes the driving force." Of the technologies, CRTs for rear projection have the lowest cost, but it is hard to improve their brightness and reduce size. LCoS has good performance but is likely to remain expensive because of the cost of processing the silicon substrate. DMD/MEMS technology is complicated and hard to make cheaply - and it, also, sits on silicon. The Future for large displays is likely to include intense competition among technologies, Silzars said, and "the only technologies that can be successful are those susceptible of economical manufacturing that delivers prices acceptable to consumer." In the first keynote address, "Technology Development in and around Mobile Displays," Johan van de Ven, CTO of Philips Mobile Display Systems in Hong Kong, sketched a picture of the future of mobile displays that is both exciting and very challenging. In doing so, he pointed out that "mobile displays are not just small notebook displays." Van de Ven said that after huge growth in 2000, the volume demand