Display Week 2009: ID Magazine Blog Entries: Day 1

Information Display's "roving reporters" are blogging about what they've discovered at the 47th annual Society for Information Display's Symposium, Seminar & Exhibition. Here's an early look from SID President Paul Drzaic:

June 1, 2009. Some interesting tidbits from the Business Conference, and a look ahead to the Symposium.

Taiwanese company PVI and E Ink announced that they have agreed on terms for PVI to acquire E Ink for $215M. This acquisition affirms that the e-reader display category is one that's here to stay, and cements E Ink's technology as the current leader. Papers in the Symposium by PVI and by Polymer Vision on flexible and rollable displays will describe innovative new form factors for e-reader technology.

Markets breed competition, though, and Pixel 's Mary Lou Jepsen described in her Business Conference keynote address the first prototypes of the company's video-capable liquid crystal-based e-paper technology. Built using conventional LCD fabs, the display shows a black-and-white, high-reflectivity e-paper mode, and has a color backlit mode as well.

Also in the Business Conference, Jim Cathey of Qualcomm noted that the company now has a dedicated facility in Taiwan for fabrication of its Mirasol MEMs-based reflective display, and will be showing a 5-in. prototype--much larger than any display shown by the company to date--in its booth at Display Week. This reflective technology has color and fast-response capability as well.

In the technical Symposium, Liquavista will describe adapting its reflective electrowetting technology to a field sequential color backlit mode, showing the potential of this technology to have video capability in both monochrome reflective and color transmissive modes.

For technologies that are inherently low power, this technology segment is heating up! More to come later in the week. --Paul Drzaic, President, Society for Information Display