Fred Kahn work on LCD since 1967, LCOS projectors, VAN-LCD

Posted by – June 29, 2017

Dr. Frederic J. Kahn is an early pioneer in Liquid Crystal Displays, He developed some of the original LCD technology for Hewlett Packard calculators. Currently President of Kahn International, he recognized early on the unique physical properties of liquid crystals and their applicability to a broad range of direct-view (flat-panel) and projection displays, as well as to related printing and electronic component manufacturing systems. He has consistently and successfully followed up and built upon that vision with major contributions to the development of commercial enterprises based on information-display technologies.

At the NEC Central Research Laboratory in Kawasaki, Japan, from 1968 to 1969, he proposed and initiated NEC’s liquid-crystal-display R&D, including invention of a field-effect color-change LCD. Starting in 1970, at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, he initiated Bell Labs’ LCD R&D; advanced the understanding and control of LC molecular alignment on solid substrates; invented and was the first to publicly disclose (June 30, 1971) a vertically aligned nematic (VAN) LCD that reorients in a preferred direction at low voltage and which, after three decades of additional development and invention by subsequent workers, is now used in most flat-panel LCD TVs and high-performance LCD projectors; and invented and developed high-resolution LCD projection imaging devices and systems based on laser-addressed smectic-A LCDs.

While Kahn was a project manager for liquid-crystal displays at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, he led the development of multiplexed TN-LCD technology, which led to HP’s first LCD calculator products, including the best-selling HP 12c business calculator, introduced in 1981 and still sold today (2010). He also developed 40-character multiplexed dot-matrix alpha-numeric LCDs for portable computers and a computer-interactive high-resolution C-sized engineering drawing display. As department manager for optical materials and polymers and later for storage physics, he also led optical-fiber, IC-lithography, and erasable-optical-memory programs.

Kahn founded Greyhawk Systems in Milpitas, California, in 1984 and served as VP Technology, with operational responsibility for LC light-valve development and manufacturing, as well as for new systems and applications development based on IR laser-addressed smectic-A and real-time photo-addressed (CRT and active-matrix) a-Si LCD projection technology. Greyhawk’s products included 7.5-Mpixel 40-in. D and 37.5-Mpixel 144-in. D full-color displays (Softplot and LAD, respectively), an 8.4-Mpixel professional short-run color printer (Ilford Digital Photo Imager), and a 31.5-Mpixel printed-circuit-board exposure and development system (DuPont Seriflash).

According to Dr. S. T. Wu at the College of Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida, “Dr. Kahn has made significant scientific and technological contributions in liquid-crystal alignment, especially single-domain vertical alignment, which laid down the foundation for today’s liquid-crystal–on–silicon projectors (commercialized by Sony and JVC), thermally addressed electrically erased high-resolution smectic liquid-crystal light valves, and pitch dilation of cholesteric liquid crystals, just to name a few.”

Dr. Kahn has 18 issued U.S. patents and is the author or editor of over 40 technical publications. He has been a Fellow of SID since 1981. In 2011 he received the Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize, the highest honor of the Society for Information Display (SID) for his “contributions to the research, development and commercialization of liquid crystal displays.”

He has been General Chairman or Program Chairman of six international display conferences sponsored by SID, SPIE, and/or IEEE. He has also served as an SID International Officer (Secretary) and is currently a member of the SID Display Industry Awards Committee and the SID Display Week Program Committee. His current work includes intellectual property and high leverage consulting activities.

Filmed at the SID Display Week tradeshow.

SID disclaimer: Opinions and facts presented by the interviewee are their own and do not represent SID’s views or opinions and are not corroborated by SID.

Larry Weber talks Plasma vs LCD History

Posted by – June 29, 2017

Larry F. Weber is an American electrical engineer and businessman who has devoted his 30-year professional career to the advancement and promotion of plasma displays, founder, president and CEO of Plasmaco in 1987 selling it to Panasonic in 1996. Dr. Weber has published 40 papers and holds 13 patents on plasma displays, including one for the energy recovery sustain circuit used in all the latest color PDP products manufactured worldwide.

Larry Weber is a recognized leader in the display community, serving on several SID committees and was General Chairman of the 1988 International Display Research Conference. In 1990 Dr. Weber was elected a SID Fellow. He has received numerous awards for his work on plasma displays including SID’s Special Recognition Award in 1982 and again 1995.

This video was filmed at the SID Display Week tradeshow.

SID disclaimer: Opinions and facts presented by the interviewee are their own and do not represent SID’s views or opinions and are not corroborated by SID.

Google fined €2.42 billion by EU, Press conference and Q&A by Margrethe Vestager

Posted by – June 29, 2017
Category: Google

EU Commission fines Google €2.42 billion for abusing dominance as search engine by giving illegal advantage to own comparison shopping service. European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy gives this statement and Q&A with the media. 9 years ago, I video-blogged for Margrethe Vestager’s political party in Denmark: http://youtube.com/radikaletv

Press release: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-1784_en.htm
Source for the video: http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/focus/index.cfm?sitelang=en&focusid=2480

Socionext 24-core ARM Server SynQuacer SC2A11, 60% lower power than Intel at same performance

Posted by – June 27, 2017

Socionext presents SynQuacer SC2A11 cloud ARM server based on 24-core ARM Cortex-A53 highly integrated low-power server system suitable for edge computing which processes data at the edge of the cloud in the IoT era. Socionext develop high power efficiency processor chip, and it is 60% power reduction on same performance compare to conventional chip. Also it is very good performance in parallel processing, like hadoop. This high power efficiency processor chip will be suitable for various application in the IoT era.

Nano Dimension 3D printed multi-layer PCBs

Posted by – June 27, 2017

Nano Dimension Ltd is focused on the research and development of advanced 3D printed electronics, including a 3D printer for multilayer printed circuit boards (PCB’s), and the development of nanotechnology-based conductive and dielectric inks, which are complementary products for 3D printers. Filmed at the IDTechEx Show!

Jenax J.Flex, Flexible Li-Ion Rechargeable Battery


Jenax J.Flex is an innovative flexbile battery freeing design limitations without sacrificing power enabling new form factors for flexible smartphones, flexible wearables and other ideas for flexible future devices based on Li-Ion Gel polymer electrolyte enabling rapid movement of lithium ion with no overheating, high energy density, low internal resistance and that can be stable even with bending fatigue. Filmed at the IDTechEx Show!

Electric Taxi with Battery Swap, 550kg, Adaptive City Mobility Prototype

Posted by – June 25, 2017

Adaptive City Mobility is the development of a complete, emission-free mobility concept for cities. Ten cooperating technology ventures are constructing a small electric light-weight vehicle of the vehicle category L7E and developing it for series production. Combined with an innovative software, hardware and battery exchange system it depicts an extensive solution for the urban mobility of the future, E Ink displays are used on the back for advertisement.

Filmed at the IDTechEx Show!

Gigabyte shows Cavium ThunderX2 ARM Server with AMD/Nvidia GPGPU for HPC

Posted by – June 19, 2017

Gigabyte shows a prototype of their upcoming 2U dual socket Cavium ThunderX2 ARM Powered Server optimized form factor with customization options like using AMD or Nvidia GPGPU Cards support, very high IO bandwidth expansions, storage, a lot of RAM, among many other optimizations and features, discusses all the considerations that they are having with their customers for the design, how Gigabyte can be creative about enabling higher value to their customers who many are now looking forward to launch ARM Servers as the ThunderX2 might have a fast enough performance, and they are aiming to provide a value proposition to be the system of choice for large cloud companies and for small companies also. Also working with Redhat, Suse and Linaro, bringing up the ecosystem to enable the cloud server and high performance computing market.

Cavium ThunderX2 at Computex 2017, Windows Server on ARM, Foxconn (Ingrasys), Inventec, Gigabyte

Posted by – June 18, 2017

Cavium ThunderX2 is the world’s most powerful ARM Processor for Data Center optimized for compute, storage, network and secure compute workloads in the cloud. Cavium ThunderX2 provides the world’s biggest single thread and multi-thread dual socket ARM Server performance, with 100s of Gigabits of I/O bandwidth, up to 1TB RAM through multiple DDR4 72bit memory controllers, Thunderx2 can run Windows Server on ARM also known as the Project Olympus and it runs every type of ARM Linux Server.

24-core Cavium Octeon TX for Networking, Base Stations, Security, NAS, Gateways

Posted by – June 18, 2017

Cavium Octeon-TX family of SoCs is configured from single core up to 24-cores 64bit ARMv8.1 cores designed with Cavium’s optimized implementation of the CPU core. Cavium Octeon TX is optimized to run multiple concurrent data and control planes simultaneously for applications such as UTM & Security, Appliances, IOT Gateways, NAS, Switch Control Plane, Mainstream Control Plane, NFV and SDN infrastructure, service provider CPE, Network Attached Printers, Enterprise Access Points, Service Provider Gateways, Industrial, Military/Aero and more enabling secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data center, cloud, wired and wireless networking for control plane and data plane applications in networking, security, and storage.

TechNexion Factory Tour


TechNexion is a design and manufacturing company showing in this video its engineering team, that designs IoT smart devices, development boards for the needs of projects like the ARM powered Android Things ecosystem by Google or Amazon Alexa Voice-Recognition development platform and its advanced manufacturing capabilities. In the video, we get a direct glimpse of how ARM modules and systems are designed and how much automation is being utilized in a smart SMT factory. The video tour takes you through all production stages from the module design to SMT manufacturing to post production functional testing. The factory churns out up to 250K PCBA per month. Filmed on location at the TechNexion factory in Taipei, Taiwan in June 2017.

IDTechEx tours SID Display Week 2017

Posted by – June 15, 2017

IDTechEx Analyst Dr Guillaume Chansin walks us around the SID Display Week 2017 exhibition floor at the Los Angeles Convention Center, featuring Samsung, LG, JDI, BOE, CLEARink, E Ink and more. Talking about the state of flexible displays, OLED, Micro LCD, Plastic displays, E Ink, CLEARink, LG’s Wallpaper OLED, Samsung’s Quantum Dot LCD, and more. Check back for many more videos from the SID Display Week, and I am also posting many videos from the latest IDTechEx show over the coming weeks at http://138.2.152.197/category/tradeshows/idtechex/

I-Zone startups and prototypes at SID Display Week 2017

Posted by – June 13, 2017

Sriram Peruvemba, Chair of Marketing at SID and Harit Doshi, Chair of I-Zone at SID show around the I-Zone at SID Display Week 2017, where more than 50 start-up companies, universities and incubators are demonstrating cutting-edge demos and prototypes that can lead to revolutionary display products of tomorrow. They showcase the newest thinking, latest products, some of which haven’t even hit the marketplace yet, and could be the next Big Thing. Check back in the days ahead, as I will be posting many more videos from the SID Display Week and from many of the startups at the I-Zone at SID Display Week.

QuirkLogic CTO shows Quilla at SID Display Week 2017

Posted by – June 12, 2017

QuirkLogic Quilla is a 42″ E Ink Smart Whiteboard solution. At SID’s DisplayWeek 2017, here’s a video with Mike Mabey, CTO and co-founder of QuirkLogic. He explains the whole concept of real time ideation, basically he says all major companies and even start ups begin their strategy by drawing up the vision on a white board, this information is not editable, not safe, usually found on someone’s phone. With Quilla, this sharing can happen in real time, it is secure, can be edited and improved upon at any time. The is E Ink display is the largest in the world, the Quilla has 5 point multi-touch for navigation, has both pen and finger touch input ability, weighs 22lbs, can carried outside to work outdoors on battery for 16 hours, 16GB memory with 64GB expansion capable, 2 USB 2.0 ports, RJ45, wifi, NFC and bluetooth. The Quilla is aimed at replacing whiteboards in all conference rooms, they already have customers signing up to be early adopter.

QuirkLogic CEO talks Quilla 42″ E Ink Whiteboard

Posted by – June 12, 2017

Interview with QuirkLogic co-founder and CEO Nashir Samanani (see my previous video of the QuirkLogic Quilla), talking about the company and the team that he leads to create the QuirkLogic Quilla 42″ E Ink collaborative whiteboard system that is about to get released.

Foldable 10.2″ E Ink e-reader, Fashion, Flexible Plastic Logic, Smartwatch, Smart Card and more

Posted by – June 12, 2017

E Ink shows some of their latest awesome demos including a 10.2″ Flexible Carta Mobius plastic flexible based e-reader device with 220ppi high resolution, an impressive color changing 2-pigment E Ink Prism dress, 42″ active matrix E Ink for digital signage, Plastic Logic shows some of their plastics based flexible E Ink displays such as 10.7″ with organic material flexible backplane, color E Ink, shelf labels, Visionect Joan conference room displays, Sony FES Watch U, Amazon Oasis, E Ink Smart Card updating through NFC. And the QuirkLogic Quilla 42″ interactive whiteboard. Filmed at the SID Display Week.

Corning Precision Glass TGV semiconductor packaging to enable revolutionary PCB designs, more compact, cheaper

Posted by – June 11, 2017

Corning Precision Glass Solutions shows high precision wafer and panel format glass-based-solutions, enabling higher speeds, lower form factors and enhanced optical performance in a variety of applications. Corning suggests that their Glass can provide many opportunities for advanced packaging. The most obvious advantage is given by the material properties. As an insulator, glass has low electrical loss, particularly at high frequencies. The relatively high stiffness and ability to adjust the coefficient of thermal expansion gives advantages to manage warp in glass core substrates and bonded stacks for both through glass vias (TGV) and carrier applications. Glass also gives advantages for developing cost effective solutions. Glass forming processes allow the potential to form both in panel format as well as at thicknesses as low as 100 um, giving opportunities to optimize or eliminate current manufacturing methods.

At their SID Display Week 2017 booth, Corning also showcases some of their other technologies related to their Corning Glass for the display industry, including Corning Gorilla Glass 5 for improved drop performance for phones, Vibrant Corning Gorilla Glass for printing vibrate images on glass for decorative use, Corning Gorilla Glass for the Automotive market, that they claim is tougher than plastic, enabling high touch sensitivity and that can be cold formed into complex 3D shapes to enable the upcoming comformed display for automotive market. Corning Lotus NXT Glass enables conformed Smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S8/S8+ with edge conformed displays, higher resolutions, more brithness, better energy efficiency, and more innovative designs for smartphones with high performance backplane LTPS-LCD and LTPS-OLED.

BOE Flexible OLED, 27″ 8K, Bezel-less, foldable phone, AMQLED, 4K and more

Posted by – June 11, 2017

BOE from Beijing China shows their flexible OLED, plastic displays, which will be used for the foldable and flexible bezel-less smart phones of the future. BOE also shows their 5″ AMQLED Active Quantum-dot Light Emitting Diode display. 3.5″ 4320×4800 ultra high pixel density VR/AR display. BOE iGallery 37″ 8K LCD with 325dpi 100% high color gamut. MLOC and metal-mesh active pen touch technology also with force touch. 5.7″ 4K lower power display. Eye-care display with less blue light. 5.5″ QHD 3D with eye tracking. 13.3″ FHD privacy display. 18.4″ 4K display with 110% Adobe color gamut. 9.6″ HD automotive dual view. 15.6″ Curved plastic display for automotive. 27″ 8K display. Filmed at the SID Display Week.

Google Keynote at SID Display Week 2017, Clay Bavor, VP of Google VR/AR


Google is Enabling rich and immersive experiences in virtual and augmented reality, presented by Clay Bavor (at Google since 2005), Google Vice President of Virtual Reality where Google works to create an efficient and scalable software platform for rich VR and AR services to be powered by high performance, power-efficient ARM CPUs, GPUs, sensors, and where Google is also working with the Display insutry to bring amazing new ultra high resolution VR and AR displays to the market. As you can see in this video of the keynote, at the SID Display Week, Google announced they are working with Sharp to create ultra-high resolution LCD displays for VR optimized for very low lag time. Google also works to create 20megapixel per eye prototype VR and AR displays, amounting to 2.5x 4K resolution per eye. And Google is working with ARM and other companies to bring foveated rendering technology to not require the 100-150Gbit/s bandwith for VR and AR content once the microdisplays have such high resolution, this method involves using a camera to track where the eye is focusing and render a very high resolution of exactly what you’re looking at while keeping the resolution and detail lower for where you are not looking at directly, and doing all that accurately with minimal lag time.

Acer H7850/V7850 4K DLP Projector

Posted by – June 7, 2017

Acer presents their new 4K DLP projectors at 2499€ and 2999€ (MSRP, price may vary by location). Bringing 4K projectors closer to being affordable by a larger market. Here we try to look at the 4K quality. Acer V7850 (2999€ MSRP) has 2200 lumen suitable for Home Cinema use with a RGBRGB color wheel for HDR and Rec709 and Rec2020 color accuracy while the H7850 (2499€ MSRP) is brighter at 3000 lumens using a normal RGBYCMW color wheel achieves HDR Rec2020 compatibility. Both have AccuMotion Frame interpolation for smooth sequences when there is fast movement. Both have 1 million to 1 contrast ratio. This is a nice first step by Acer to bring 4K Projectors into the mass market, I hope that by next year there might be some even more compact sub-$1000 4K DLP projectors on the market. It is awesome to be able to see the 4K quality with HDR on a huge 100-150 diagonal inch display on the wall at home.