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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.'"
'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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Their staff are actually hampsters who got their Ph.Ds. on-line.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
'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.
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
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.