DisplayTaiwan, being held here through Friday, has much of the vertical-display-industry character of Japan’s Flat Panel Display International (FPDI), but it’s smaller and has less of an international flavor. For instance, while the major Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean panel-makers all come to Yokohama for FPDI, only Taiwan’s Big 3 large-flat-panel manufacturers — AUO, CMO and CPT — are at Display Taiwan. Also here is the passive-OLED display maker RIT display and the ePaper company SiPix, which recently sold a significant minority share to AUO.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

Non-Taiwanese materials and equipment companies, including Nikko Metals (ITO targets) and Merck (LCD materials), are on hand to support their customers, but the show’s organizers — the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA), Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI), the Photonics Industry & Technology Development Association (PIDA), and the Taipei Computer Association (TCA) — clearly want to encourage more international participation.

Display Taiwan 2009 has about 200 exhibitors and 500 booths, said Publicity Manager Lily Chu. That’s respectable, but the event seems much larger because it shares the show floor of the Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC) with three other shows — Opto Taiwan, Solar Taiwan, and Optics — which are all part of the Photonics Festival in Taiwan. (LED Lighting Taiwan is also nearby.)

In the end, Display Taiwan is unique, in part, because it provides the opportunity to speak with Taiwanese display makers on their own turf. So what did they have to say? Here are a few nuggets.

CMO Director of IT Marketing James Yang said that 85% of his company’s panels for notebooks would be LED-lit this year. He thinks it will be about two years before mainstream TV panels have LED backlighting.

CMO also showed an LCD-TV panel with 240Hz frame rate and a 240Hz scanning backlight that produced a Moving Picture Response Time (MPRT) of 3.4ms. Why this approach rather than 480Hz frame rate? It allows an upgrade path from a simple 240Hz without radically changing the basic platform. Yang said the panel should be available next year.

B. D. Liu, VP at AUO’s Technology Center (photo, foreground), said AUO was making three major points at Display Taiwan: 1) 3D, 2) Touch, and 3) Continuing improvement of green characteristics. The company was showing a demonstration 65-inch autostereoscopic barrier-type 3D panel with 12 views. The base resolution is Full HD, but the horizontal resolution is divided by 12. "What is a reasonable resolution for 3D," Liu asked rhetorically. AUO is thinking about that now, he said.

AUO was emphasizing the role of thin and light panels in green displays. Why? Reducing material use is one way to reduce pressure on the global ecosystem. Reducing material content is also a cost saving. Does it save enough to compensate for the additional engineering and the possibly more expensive processes needed to fabricate a thin-and-light panel? Yes, said Liu. He believes there will be a net cost saving in making thin-and-light panels.

AUO was showing a 240Hz panel with 2.4ms response time (but this number is not necessarily comparable to CMO’s 3.4ms MPRT). Liu said AUO is not using a blinking backlight because you either lose luminance with a blinking backlight (because it is, by definition, off for part of the time) or you have to increase power consumption. Is 240Hz by itself enough? "That’s a key question," Liu answered. "We’re working on that."

CPT showed a nine-panel tiled AS-3D display with a total diagonal of 110 inches. The display was visible continuously without well-defined sweet spots, but at the cost of cross-talk and image quality. Signage is the intended application. Beyond 3D, other "megatrends" for CPT are multi-touch for Windows 7, green displays, and thin-and-light.

CPT was also showing a 31.5-inch LCD with modular light-guide plate for LED backlighting. The LGP consisted of 80 tiles, each of which had 16 white LEDs around its edges. This winds up being about the same number of LEDs used in traditional direct backlighting, so why bother? The answer is it allows the module to be much thinner than traditional direct backlighting, while still permitting local area dimming, said engineer Ko-Szu Yu and a colleague, their answers translated by Lily Chu.

SiPix and AUO were both showing a 6-inch SiPix/AUO electrophoretic eBook display. The display, which uses SiPix’s new Flex-It Bright imaging film looked good, but with a reflectivity of 36%, it is not as bright as E Ink’s current VizPlex film. SiPix Chairman C. T. Liu, who is also a Sr. VP at AUO, said they expect to match E Ink’s reflectivity of 40 to 44% soon.

Where SiPix can potentially outperform E Ink, Liu said, is in color. It should be possible, he said, to selectively fill the microcups in SiPix’s film with red, green, and blue "ink" via ink-jet printing. This should give brighter color than is possible with the matrix color filter used in the developmental color panels.

These are a few of the nuggets Insight Media mined at Display Taiwan. See the next issue of Large Display Report for more of them.