USDC: Growing with the flat panel display industry
09/01/1997
USDC: Growing with the flat panel display industry
Michael Ciesinski, J. Norman Bardsley, PhD, US Display Consortium, San Jose, California
Although the earliest USDC programs to develop new sources of critical tools, materials, and components are showing success, much still needs to be done. With over 30 programs in the field, and only a dozen or so at beta site or in production, continued oversight is necessary. Additionally, USDC`s technical council has identified other work programs that we are putting out for bid to the supplier community. If our current schedule remains valid, the primary work of USDC involving infrastructure development should peak in about 1999 or 2000. This presages the "sunset" of the DARPA (Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency) display technology development program.
Facilitating and managing cooperative activities among USDC members will be an emerging role for USDC. When companies are small, as many USDC members are, cooperation in noncompetitive, nonproprietary areas is sometimes the only way to succeed. USDC members are, for example, looking to team to solve back-end processing issues, such as yield management, substrate tracking, defect identification and characterization, and so on. USDC helps by refining the issues, identifying sources of funding, and providing project coordination services.
Information exchange is intrinsic to consortia and trade groups. This includes hosting discussions and managing working groups on industry standards, data collection, and public policy. These activities must be conducted in a global context. Fierce competition among companies in several countries for pre-eminence in the display market is hampering cooperation. It is left to organizations like USDC, the Electronic Industries Association of Japan (EIAJ), the Electronic Display Industrial Research Association of Korea (EDIRAK), and Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) to show how cooperation can increase efficiency and profitability, benefiting the consumer through lower costs and greater availability of products. Recently, USDC signed a memorandum of understanding with EDIRAK to exchange ideas on tools and materials projects and to cooperate in other areas of displays. USDC
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The past and current state of flat panel displays
High volume, liquid crystal display (LCD) manufacturing lines have been the province of Asian electronics manufacturers, particularly Japanese companies. Give them credit - they anticipated the demand and responded. Korean and Taiwanese companies have similarly started to plan and now build AMLCD lines to supply the world`s notebook computer manufacturers. Many of these companies are targeting the desktop market with AMLCDs and the home entertainment market with plasma displays. Profit margins have often been thin or nonexistent in the notebook market, although companies that can produce 12.1- or 13.3-in. displays with high yield from third-generation substrates are now doing extremely well. Billions of dollars have been invested in plants to fabricate large plasma panels, but the commercial viability of the product is yet to be shown. Making profits in the newer markets is the major challenge ahead.
US and European companies have been slower to respond to the demand for displays, for a variety of reasons. Some companies recall painfully their retreat from the DRAM business, and liken the LCD business to that experience; others see no strategic threat in having off-shore suppliers of components, since notebook manufacturing is conducted primarily in Asia. US government investments in R&D, however, have provided a well-spring of technology from which US firms can draw. Now that new technologies for displays are emerging (Table 1), product solutions should start to flow.
Future markets
At a recent USDC-sponsored conference, Malcolm Thompson, president and CEO of dpiX (a Xerox New Enterprise Co.) characterized the volume display market as "up to this point in time, basically one technology (LCD) and one product (notebook PCs)." His point was that the display industry needs to mature and provide more than one solution that will, in turn, create more applications.
USDC`s Commercial User Group (CUG) and Military and Avionics User Group, composed of several different types of display consumers, helps USDC members understand the changing requirements. The CUG members agree that there has been only one multibillion dollar market segment for displays - notebook computers - but they believe others will soon emerge. Primary candidates are desktop monitors, handheld devices, home entertainment systems, and projection systems.
Invading the desktop market for households will likely prove to be a formidable task: currently 14-in. CRT monitors are priced around $300, and an AMLCD solution costs many times that amount. With annual CRT production of over 200 million units, however, even a 1% market share could result in billions of dollars in sales. In environments where there is limited space and unique requirements, or for high-end products such as medical instruments, cost may not be a limiting factor. Further examples are in the graphics and publishing industries, currently experiencing explosive growth because of the Internet craze. Consumers in these markets may very well pay a premium for a large display that provides a very good image and true color fidelity.
Small, multimedia devices for receiving, manipulating and sending information will likely experience rapid market growth. Essentially, take the functions of a pager, cellular telephone, e-mail device, and a notebook PC, add a good display and perhaps a camera, and you have the next world-beater in personal computing and communications technology. One of the current constraints on such a device is the display, which tends to be low performance, heavy, and power hungry. Here`s where a reflective LCD or an organic LED could enable a new product.
The projection display market is hot and will likely get hotter. The markets for these types of displays include entertainment and business. On the entertainment front, US homes are especially well-suited to large displays. The proliferation of digital television, and the response by cable companies, has vastly increased programming choices, especially for movies and sports. This, in turn, is influencing the types of home entertainment systems (not just a TV anymore!) consumers are willing to buy.
Business applications abound for projection displays, ranging from industry conferences to training meetings to sales presentations. Fierce competition among different technologies is helping to drive this market, with an emerging US technology, the digital micro-mirror, competing with CRT, amorphous-Si LCD, and poly-Si LCD light modulators.
Finally, ruggedized displays have yet to play their part. Although mostly confined to the military area, these displays can provide solutions to many commercial display problems. For example, displays are being built for the cockpit of fighter planes with enhanced performance in terms of brightness, resolution, viewing angle, and resistance to temperature extremes. This type of display may likely be a solution for the automotive market, which has not moved much past electro-mechanical gauges. Similarly, a head-mounted display for an Army maintenance engineer can easily be adapted to the needs of a technician repairing a copying machine or automobile. The limiting factors are in the cost of the display, not basic technology (Table 2).
Standards development
Industry standards are beneficial in many ways. USDC is supporting SEMI in its international effort to define an appropriate portfolio of manufacturing and inspection standards. The goal is to ensure that the many components that go into a display are compatible and to encourage maximum cost savings through higher volume production of tools, components and materials. To date, 14 separate standard sets have been defined and published. The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has many committees working on standards both for electronic interfaces and performance measurement, some of which are specific to pixellated flat panel displays, others which are more generic. In the area of projection displays, "ANSI" definitions of such properties as brightness, uniformity, contrast ratios, and color chromaticity are emerging from a committee sponsored by the National Association of Photographic Equipment Manufacturers. Display standards for commercial aircraft are being developed by the Society for Automobile Engineers, which has a strong aviation component.
The United States Display Consortium (USDC) was formed in 1993 by private industry and the Department of Defense, on behalf of the US government. USDC`s charter is simple: help build a US based equipment and materials infrastructure as a precursor to volume display manufacturing and provide an industry platform for cooperative industry activities. We have 14 industry partners, and our government partner is DARPA.
USDC came about because of the need in the US for better electronic displays for both civilian and military applications, and the inability to assure a consistent source of supply, especially for ruggedized displays. The display, according to one industry pundit, is "the last mile of the information superhighway"; it is the product that delivers the content to the consumer. In the view of the Defense Department, information properly delivered can make US forces qualitatively superior to a force that is numerically larger. This leverage
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The growth of worldwide IC sales is compared with worldwide FPD sales over a 34-year period.is especially vital as US spending on military defense declines.
For commercial applications, electronic displays that are lighter and cheaper are needed to complete the information superhighway. Portable computer manufacturers recognize this need, as will suppliers of industrial and medical instruments, automobiles, trucks, planes, boats, consumer products and all sorts of audio/visual equipment. With the overlapping of the computer and entertainment industries, the same displays may be used for recreation as for personal and corporate business.
Right now, the electronic display market is in its infancy. If it is compared to the IC industry, then < 2% of lifecycle revenues have been achieved (see figure). New technologies and new entrants will likely be appearing quite rapidly. We may ultimately end up with the "display as the product," as more integration on to the display occurs. These changes will make the electronic display industry worth watching for some time to come.
Michael Ciesinski is president and CEO of the US Display Consortium. J. Norman Bardsley, PhD, is USDC`s director of roadmaps and standards, and is on sabbatical leave from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Updated information from the organizations discussed in this article can be obtained from the Internet under www.usdc.org, www.semi.org, and www.vesa.org. USDC, 50 W. San Fernando, Suite 920, San Jose, CA 95113; ph 408/277-2400, fax 408/277-2490.