Santa Rita do Sapucai, Brazil - LatinDisplay 2009, which was held November 16-18 at a theater on the campus of the Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP) in São Paulo, Brazil, was generally regarded as a major success. Invited international and Brazilian speakers discussed display-related technologies and issues in a single-track format that encouraged discussion and cross-fertilization. The invited speakers stayed for the entire conference for the most part, contributing to wide-ranging conversations and enriching Q&A sessions that did not allow even the most distinguished speakers to escape unchallenged. Here are some highlights

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

Afonso Hennel, President and CEO of Semp Toshiba, discussed his company’s 60 years of TV manufacturing in Brazil. The Sociedade Eletro Mercantil Paulista (SEMP) started manufacturing consumer electronics in 1942. It had been a major importer and distributor of radios, but when World War II disrupted the flow of imported radios, SEMP started making its own. Without competition, the company grew steadily. The joint venture SEMP Toshiba, established in 1977, is the biggest manufacturer of TVs in Brazil and the largest user of displays. I was told informally - and NOT by anybody associated with SEMP Toshiba - that SEMP, not Toshiba, is the dominant partner in the JV.

Hennel commented that the Brazilian government is encouraging SEMP Toshiba to manufacture LCDs in Brazil, since the company’s importing of LCD modules makes a significant negative contribution to the country’s balance of payments - $10B this year, and it could easily go to $20B in the future.

Margarida Baptista of BNDES - the Brazilian development bank - noted that with the demise of the CRT there is no longer any manufacturing of large displays in Brazil. She also commented that sometime after 2014, Brazil is likely to become the world’s fifth largest economy.

Ernst Lueder (Electro-Optical Consultancy, Scottsdale, AZ) commented that 120Hz is not a sufficiently fast frame rate for high-quality 3D TV. That still gives you cross-talk between the right- and left-eye views. 240Hz is needed.

Scott Birnbaum of Samsung discussed PenTile technology at some length and described a notebook display his company exhibited at Flat Panel Display International that used PenTile technology and local 1-D dimming for a power consumption of less than 1 watt. CCFL active dimming will be in commercially available panels in 2010.

Vladimir Chigrinov (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) scattered challenging ideas like a farmer scattering corn for his chickens. One of them was that in-cell micro-retarders implemented with photo-alignment is being regarded by panel-makers as the only practical way to get to high-volume 3D TV.

G. Rajeswaran, now Group Chief Technology Officer for MoserBaer India, but formerly the head of the program at Kodak that created the first commercial full-color AMOLED display, had some interesting comments on the history of that program. In the past, there have been comments that the Sanyo-Kodak alliance was an unfortunate one, whose deficiencies delayed the progress of AMOLED displays. Rajeswaran said that Sanyo was the only possible partner because only Sanyo was able to do LTPS as a volume process at the time. What finally did the program in, Raeswaren said, was not a conflict of cultures between the partners, but the destruction of Sanyo’s Gifu plant in an earthquake, quickly followed by new Kodak management that had a new set of priorities. When the program was sharply downgraded in 2003, where did many of the engineers go? They went to Samsung, which is now the world’s pre-eminent manufacturer of AMOLED displays.

That experience translated into the later 10Xn program at Kodak (10 times better than Gifu) and the conclusion that vacuum thermal evaporation through a shadow mask is not a viable process for large substrates. So Kodak’s current approach is linear evaporation of white OLED emitter and the use of a RGBW color matrix filter to make a color display.

Ken Werner (yes, that’s me) surveyed the status of ePaper displays for eBook readers, and observed that life is unfair. In this case, that means that just as a huge surge in volume for EBR displays is occurring the EBR usage paradigm is shifting. That, in turn, will change the definition of what an EBR display is and should be. I reviewed alternatives to current EBR displays and predicted that some of these displays will be compatible with EBR-Netbook hybrid products to come.

I’m nearly out of space, but not out of ideas. So I’ll wrap up by mentioning there were a sizable number of invited papers on phosphors, LEDs, AMOLEDs, and solid-state lighting. In keeping with the instructions laid out by LatinDisplay Program Chair, Daniel den Engelsen, these papers were readily understandable by people who were neither chemists nor lighting designers. That enabled lively and informative discussions and Q&A sessions.

One more thing. Yoocharn Jeon, formerly with LGE and now with HP, talked about HP’s work on flexible displays and techniques for making active-matrix backplanes on the unstable materials used in roll-to-roll processing. I had several questions but time ran out in the Q&A session. So here’s one of them, Yoocharn: Why is HP developing display manufacturing processes in the U.S.?