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MicroDisplay Claims Progress Toward Elusive LCoS
zajaco0 writes "USA Today posted an article that talks about the LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon) technology that is being researched for the next thin, big-screen TVs. Big companies invest millions of dollars researching this technology and none of them seem to be making any headway. The companies who have this project on their failed list include Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Intel, and Philips. MicroDisplay seems to be making some progress though, says the company's CEO: 'After 22 designs, 320 man-years, a 50% staff of Ph.Ds, and $50 million, you end up with a design that works.'"
320 men year of highly qualified researchers for 50 million, that works out pretty cheap. 150 000 dollars for a year of research? Where can you get that?
By well, if you mean 'not so well', then yes. Compared to management, a lot of phD's don't make all that much in research. Most people go into research (any type of research) because they are intrested in the field and subject.
USA today. The mouthpiece of marketing droids everywhere. Call me cynical, but I'll believe it when I see one down at Best Buy.
'After 22 designs, 320 man-years, a 50% staff of Ph.Ds, and $50 million, you end up with a design that works.'
One would hope.
-Teiresias
- "After 22 designs, 320 man-years, a 50% staff of Ph.Ds, and $50 million, you end up with a design that works."
How many tries did it take Edison to invent the light bulb? Thousands. This is a little more tricky than building a light bulb that can last for 1000 hours.Edison himself said, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."
I've been following the story about the joint venture between Toshiba and Canon on SED TV's for some time. Apparently it has become somewhat more real, as shown in this article.
Apparently things are going well enough with the new factory that Toshiba is stopping plasma-panel production, and staking its future on SED TV's.
SEDs are like CRTs, in that they use electron guns to shoot electrons across a vacuum at a phosphor scren to generate light. The difference is that SEDs have a semiconductor-based electron emitter at each pixel. This allows the screen to be flat, shallow (a few centimeters) and relatively lightweight, while preserving the fast response, brightness, and wide viewing-angle of regular CRTs. Also, somewhat surprisingly, SEDs are significantly less power-hungry than plasma panels or even big LED screens.
Toshiba and Canon have built a factory to start building these TVs, and apparently they are going to be trickling into the market toward the end of 2005. I can't wait!
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Philips actually had a finished LCos TV set ready for production. I saw it at a compliance testing lab that they use last January. I am not sure what kept them from marketing the set but I know that the lab tech said that it had problems with its RF emissions.
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'After 22 designs, 320 man-years, a 50% staff of Ph.Ds, and $50 million, you end up with a design that works.'
This is how we got Pamela Anderson.
I was promised by our corporate masters that by now an LCD computer monitor would be less than a CRT.
To hell with all of 'em. A team of PhD's working around the clock to invent a more expensive replacement to current tech.
Bah
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I don't get this... I own a LCoS HDtv. Its rather beautiful when displaying hidef, with the exception of a noticble banding in dark images... the black levels are not as good as I'd like. I have 55" screen, and it's fairly thin for a projection TV.... and light too. :)
-- David
David Whatley
Take the $50 million across the quoted 320 man-years and you get $156,250 per man-year. That doesn't seem like much when you consider overhead.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1745870 ,00.asp
I've said it before, even in this thread..
But the first to market with a 27" or higher HDTV for under 500 bucks will own the market. Whether it's flat or boxy, it doesn't matter.
I say 27" arbitrarily, that seems like a common minimum size for the set in most families' living rooms.
Why can't they just make a cheap high res CRT? A 15" VGA monitor can display HDTV resolutions, so just make one thats 27", and eliminate all the multi-syncing crap, 30fps is all it needs.
Seriously, what's the barrier in just scaling up a plain VGA monitor with a fixed refresh of 60hz? Would that not, in theory, be right around the price range of a standard CRT?
Plasmas, LCDs, OLEDs, LCoS, SED... None of that will be cheap in my lifetime, no matter what the developers of the tech say.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It still looks as good as it did then. No, it's not the super-badass picture in the $3,000 TVs in the stores today. But it's not getting any worse.
I've looked around and talked to people that own these fancy TVS as well as people that sell them. AFAICT, my options today are.
1. Buy a CRT tv (but I already have one!)
Maybe it'll last.
Cost: Hundreds to a thousand.
2. Buy a plasma TV.
It'll last a year if you're lucky.
Failure mode is "dead spots"
Not repairable; throw it away.
Cost: Starts at around a thousand for a crappy one.
3. Buy an LCD TV.
Same as plasma above, except failure mode is pixels stuck on or less frequently off.
4. Buy a DLP projector.
It'll probably last.
But the bulb dies after 2-4k hours.
Cost: Starts at around 500 for a crappy one.
Plus about $150-$600/year for bulbs, depending on how much TV you watch--and my wife likes to have the TV on while she's home by herself.
5. 'Course, if you're going to buy the "crappy one", you might as well keep that 10-year old RCA and save your money!
I just don't see paying $1500 to $5,000 a year to watch TV. For a 3,000 hour year, that's $0.50 to $1.67 an hour cut in salary.
To watch TV.
I like cool gadgets as much as the next guy. But I already have a TV. If I'm going to drop that kinda cash EVERY YEAR, it's not going to be on a POS TV that craps out after a year or two.
And, yes, my computer is almost 10 years old, too. It's amazing what you can get out of old hardware if you have the right distro.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Bah!
1080p chips will need to interpolate 720p broadcasts, and they will look crappy. You have three standards that matter in HDTV (there are more, but only three are actively being used):
EDTV, 480p: Most stuff produced pre-HDTV get shown as this, and the TV networks are trying to convince us this is "HDTV" so they can create multiple chennels on each slice of the spectrum. Bad networks!
720p: Most sports are broadcast like this, because the progressive image handles rapid movements far better. Sports are what is really driving HDTV's, because nobody has step up to offer HDTV porn, and do you really want them to?
1080i: Those gorgeous landscapes PBS etc broadcast are likely done in this, since there is about 1/3 more vertical data. But fast movement gets motion blur as the odd lines out show the old location, and the new lines show the new locale. Icky.
So let me know when they introduce a 2160p panel. Light three pixels for 720p, two for 1080i, (or better yet, line double the resolution up). The tech exists, and the panels aren't that big a part of the expense...
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Now for the actuall facts.
Those $3000 TVs are usually purchased with an extended warranty. Cost: $200 year. It is a full replacement warranty that covers everything including cleaning and bulb replacement. Normal life of TV: at least 5 years. More typically 7 years.
Cost for a 60" HDTV: more like $600 - $800 per year. For a family with a $100,000 year income that is less than 1%.
Normal life of TV: at least 5 years. More typically 7 years.
Hooray technological progress!
We have a ~20 year old TV that worked perfectly fine until about 2 months ago when it blew one of the capacitors in the color system. Still works fine, but any green on the screen "glows" now.
We bought a new TV and fully expect this piece of junk to work for 5 years. You can't even pay for the kind of quality you got 2 decades ago, it seems.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
SED is much lighter than a monolithic CRT because it isn't one big vacuum tube that has to be supported from the sides. There are spacers every few scanlines, much as in a plasma screen, to hold the front glass up. So, the front glass can be much thinner than the glass on a big monolithic CRT. SEDs should weigh about as much as plasma screens. Of course, they're still vapor, so they're infinitely light :)
Previously mentioned power consumption is a little more interesting. When Sony made JumboTron stadium displays, they found that the CRT mechanism is an astonishingly efficient way of turning electricity into colored light with the characteristics they wanted. JumboTrons are huge arrays of tens- to hundreds-of-thousands of little CRTs. What makes normal CRTs such power hogs is that the electrons have to be accelerated agressively to fly the distance from the back of the tube to the phosphors, and 2/3 of the electrons hit the shadow mask, and so that energy is wasted.
Similarly, in LCD screens, in the best case 2/3 of the light of the backlight is wasted by the color filters (all the green and blue light is always blocked by the red pixels, for example) and typically at least 5/6th of the light is wasted (if the pixels are half-on).
For the SED, every electron generated lights up a bit of phosphor, and only those pixels that need to be lit have any power usage at all.
Again, it'll be great if they can actually be produced in quantity. Apparently they are planning to ink-jet print the electron-emitter array, so that shouldn't be too expensive. I'm sure that the first few years of production will be as expensive as plasma screens, but hopefully that price will come down. We'll see.
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Note that Sony isn't on the LCoS bandwagon. They're skipping the microdisplay technology and going right to grating light valve (GLV) tech. MEMS and lasers. Promises to be a bit more effective than LCD reflection.
Sony is in a joint venture with this company, Silicon Light Machines:
http://www.siliconlight.com
"The companies who have this project on their failed list include Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Intel, and Philips."
Philips? Excuse me? Philips has the Cineos LCoS TV on sale. I had the privilege of seeing a prototype and quite frankly it was an impressive piece of technology. Philips's chip design fundamentally differed from TI's and I believe also Intel's. The unit I saw had a 55 inch screen, was 18 inches deep, and weighed less than 80 pounds. The picture was the clearest and sharpest I had ever seen (studio HDTV feed - slightly better than HDTV broadcast quality, but not by that much). Quite an impressive piece of equipment, but as failures go, I guess it is, well, for lack of a better word, a failure.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.