Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Displays, But Didn’t Know Whom to Ask – Forbes

A few weeks ago, around the time Pebble was breaking records on Kickstarter, I happened to be exchanging emails with Sriram Peruvemba, a veteran of the display industry and currently CMO at E Ink Holdings.  It struck me that there was probably a bigger story to be told in the world of display, with things like Pebble being just the tip of the iceberg.

This picture is a good motif for why the future of displays is a fascinating subject. When I saw this, my first thought was “I’d like an insulated coffee mug (the kind that’s usually opaque) wrapped in e-paper, connected to a level and temperature sensor, showing a fake level/heat visualization.” Yeah, silly first-world-problem type of idea, but that’s the kind of possibility now being opened up by advances in display technology. A market that is currently dominated by LCD (to the tune of 90%) and a few key applications is undergoing some rapid evolution, in terms of both technologies on offer, and the range of applications becoming possible.

A flexible display made in-house by E Ink

I figured the things I was discussing with Sriram might interest a broader audience, so we decided to turn the email conversation into an interview. So here we go, everything you ever wanted to know about the display industry, but didn’t know whom to ask.

Display technology is ubiquitous in our world, and becoming more so every day. Yet we don’t pay much attention to it. This is partly because the technology comes into our lives via famous consumer brands like Apple, Sony and Samsung, and partly because display technology is part of the background rather than the foreground for most of us. It is part of the canvas on which other technological visions are painted. Almost literally so, since display technology is about showing us other things. It physically frames the rest of technology. 

But as in other fields, figure-ground shifts are key to creative insights in technology. I suspect most of you will find this extended conversation with Sriram as interesting as I did. I suspect it will make you more alive to opportunities hiding in plain sight. I hope at least a couple of you get inspired to pursue ideas in this space.

So here we go: the interview.

Q1: Display technology meant big clunky CRT screens and cheap digital watches just 20 years ago. Now we’ve got an explosion of technologies, sizes and applications: from basic LCD and E Ink to touch screens, projection-based technologies, plasma screens and LED displays. What exactly caused this technological explosion, and what have been the highlight events in the last couple of decades?

You are correct that 20 years ago, the market was pretty much all about CRT. The other technologies that were promising at that time were Plasma, Vacuum Fluorescent (VF), LED and thin film electroluminescent (TFEL). TV was the major application for displays. There were calculators and watches but there weren’t any flat panel monitors, laptops or GPS devices.

LCD has its origins in the RCA Sarnoff labs, “Williams Domains” were discovered, I believe, in 1962, patent 3332485 awarded in 1967, and the first liquid crystal displays were built in 1968. LCD was relegated mainly to TN (twisted nematic) and it was in calculators and watches where it looked unimpressive. RCA made a clock in 1968, Optel a watch in 1970, and Rockwell a calculator in 1972.

About same time AC Plasma displays were invented at the University of Illinois. TFEL came bit later. Sharp demonstrated TFEL in 1975 and made the first commercial display in 1983, and eventually Planar Systems (after acquiring Finlux in 1991) became the world leader in TFEL, sharing the market with Sharp. In the Eighties, IBM, DEC and HP all made monitors and desktop computers using TFEL displays. (Source: Dr. Chris King) Then came STN (super twist nematic) which enabled matrix-type displays as against segmented displays with TN. Standish LCD in Wisconsin was a pioneer in this area.

In the Eighties, Seiko Epson built a color LCD TV, and several Japanese companies launched similar products, creating volume and from that, great learning in terms of manufacturing for LCD. This helped to reduce the costs of Active Matrix LCD (AMLCD) or color LCD.

IBM and Toshiba formed a joint venture and in 1992 and the Thinkpad with color LCD was launched. Small TVs, followed by laptops, flat desktop monitors, mobile phones in the 90s, and large TVs in the last six years, created a huge market for color LCD. Monochrome LCD was relegated to smaller devices with lower information content.

Along another front, in the late 90s Pioneer made monochrome OEL (Organic Electroluminiscent) or OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) for car stereos. In the mid-2000s, Kodak and Sanyo made OLED devices for cameras and other portable devices. But progress has been slow due to life time issues with the phosphorus, differential aging, image retention and other problems. But the recent 2012 CES demo of a 55″ OLED TV by LG and Samsung was quite impressive — they may cost 10x their LCD counterparts at launch but it is a start.

In the meantime, LCDs have made continued progress in materials and technology, and today occupy about a 90% share of the market. LEDs used as displays have become very popular in signage applications — think of all the outdoor displays in Vegas.

ePaper, using a dual pigment electrophoretic display, was invented by Prof. Joe Jacobson and team in the late 90s at the MIT Media Lab. They spun off a company, E Ink, which was able to create a market in eReaders (over 40M sold in eReaders alone in the past three years) and also tens of millions being used in wrist watches, smart cards, battery indicators, signage, etc. ePaper technology boasts of readability akin to printed paper, and low power consumption. A mobile phone sized battery can run an eReader for a couple of months.

Interestingly enough, even though LCD dominates, there are still CRTs being shipped today. TFEL, VF, Plasma, rear projection and other displays are still being manufactured, and tens of millions of monochrome TN and STN LCD displays are still produced.

Apart from the technologies mentioned, there are at least a dozen other technologies with niche market applications and others still being created in the labs.

Q2: Most technologists take display technology for granted, which I feel is a bit of a pity since it is so fundamental. Can you provide a high-level overview of the state of the display industry today, in terms of industry and competitive structure, value chain, relative roles of Asian and American industry, and so forth?

The electronic display industry has seen explosive growth in the past two decades, reaching $ 100B+ today. TFT/AMLCD continues to grow with new multibillion dollar fabs being built.

Electrophoretic/ePaper grew from $ 30M in 2007 to $ 1B in 2011. LED and OLED have grown tremendously as well. CRT, TFEL, DLP,plasma, electrochromic, monochrome TNLCD, FED, SED, STN LCD, projection displays, micro displays (LCoS, EL), electro-mechanical displays and others have stagnated or declined in the past few years.

There are dozens of new technologies in the lab or in early stages of commercialization including Laser Phosphor Displays, electrowetting, MEMS, electrofluidic, and technologies that can enhance existing displays like Quantum Dots etc. And each has a unique value proposition. For any of them to become mainstream, apart from that one unique value, they need to hit at least threshold level performance in brightness, contrast, viewing angle, thickness, weight, energy consumption and price.

Electrophoretic displays experienced a hockey stick growth in the past 4 years (though the hockeystick has developed a handle in the very recent past). Unlike LCD, LED, Plasma, OLED, CRT, etc., with electrophoretic most, if not all, of the growth was experienced by one company (my employer), though there are other electrophoretic display makers, including the tire giant Bridgestone. (While this article was being edited, Bridgestone after over a decade of investment into Electrophoretic technology, announced this week that it will exit the business)

Making displays takes an extraordinary amount of investment, hence fewer players jump into this business.

Twenty years ago, there was a strong American presence in this industry, but today over 90% of the display industry is in Asia. While the US remains one of the largest consumers of devices using electronic displays (TV, laptop, monitors, eReaders, tablets), we make very few displays onshore.

When I tell people that E Ink actually manufactures its core display film in Massachusetts and exports to China they are surprised, but it is indeed true. In the mid-90s a vast majority of US and European display making moved to Japan. For a while Japan was the largest maker of all kinds of displays technologies, but South Korea and Taiwan came in strong at the turn of the century and soon took over. Surprisingly, the display industry has not moved as fast to China as some other industries but display fabs are being built in China today.

The big five in the LCD industry based on 2011 revenues are Samsung, LG, CMI, AUO and Sharp. It costs upwards of $ 1B to build a TV-class LCD factory in Asia. A state of the art Gen 10 LCD factory might cost upwards of $ 3B if built today. In the past few years, the industry has been more in the red than in the black. Margins in the display business tend to be razor thin, particularly in consumer applications.

Q3: What makes LCD so dominant?

There is almost no technical feature in LCD that is better than other display technology but it is able to cross threshold levels along almost every vector.

TFEL has better response time than LCD, OLED has better color gamut than LCD, Electrophoretic beats LCD on viewing angle, LEDs beat LCD in brightness/contrast. LCD is not the thinnest, it is not lightest, it is not the most rugged, it is not sunlight readable, it is not the lowest in power consumption.