Content area
Full text
BOSTON - U.K. startup Screen Technology Ltd. (STL) came to the Society for Information Display (SID) conference here last week to report on a novel liquidcrystal display technology that it says will yield five to 10 times higher efficiency than conventional LCD approaches.
STL (Cambridge, England) worked for two years to develop and patent its photoluminescentLCD (PL-LCD), in which aliquidcrystal panel, acting as a light modulator, is sandwiched betweena narrowband, near-UV backlight and a color-phosphor front screen. Conventional LCDs use a white backlight and color filters. STL claims its approach not only increases LCD efficiency but also sidesteps one of the LCD's traditional weaknesses: a limited viewing angle.
Reactions at SID were mixed. Chris Chinnock, an independent consultant based in Norwalk, Conn., noted that fluorescent lights "use a W-excited phosphor, and they're very efficient."
"It sounds intriguing," said Paul Gulick, chief executive officer and president of Clarity Visual Systems Inc. (Wilsonville, Ore.), an LCD-projector vendor. "But you see a lot of `the flavor of the month' in the display business that wants to be the end-all and beall. I don't know how they can excite the phosphors efficiently in a flat-panel form factor. And their speed will be limited by the [LCD] shutter unless they use an active matrix, and then they'd have the active-matrix cost structure to deal with."
Roger Stewart, director of solid-state displays at Sarnoff Corp. (Princeton, N.J.), formerly the...