Rainbow Display Inc. (RDI), a Cornell start-up company created to build color flat-screen displays from technology developed at the university, has received the Society for Information Display/Information Display magazine Display of the Year Gold Award. Presented at the society's annual conference in Boston May 22, the international award cited RDI's innovative approach to building flat-panel video and television screens known as large active matrix liquid crystal displays (AMLCD).
The founders of RDI are Peter Krusius, Cornell professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Che-Yu Li, F.N. Bard Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering. The company was created in 1994 by Krusius; Li; Kailash Joshi, who earned his Ph.D. at Cornell; and Donald Seraphim, an IBM fellow who worked with the Cornell Electronic Packaging Program, which Krusius directs. The company aims to become a key supplier of large AMLCD displays for business and consumer markets.
"We are very proud of the award," said Krusius, former director and now RDI technological consultant. "When we started, it was not clear if the technology would work, and now it has been internationally recognized. What remains to be seen is if these displays will be commercially successful."
In 1999 RDI signed a joint development agreement with Philips Flat Display Systems, a unit of Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, one of the world's largest consumer electronics companies. The result is RDI's prototype 37.5-inch (diagonally) Rainbow Spectrum Model 3750, the first seamless tiling technology for large-area AMLCD's. Based on 38 patents, the new screen is made up of three smaller panels tiled together into a single, seamless display.
RDI was set up with the aid of the Cornell Research Foundation, which licensed the patents for the Cornell-developed technology exclusively to the new company. Development began six years ago in the Cornell Electronic Packaging Program, with the company operating out of the Electronic Packaging Facility on campus for its first year. It now is based in Endicott, N.Y.
The largest AMLCD flat-screens on the market today are limited to 30 inches. These displays are built as one defect-free panel on a single piece of glass. Anything bigger than about 21 inches and today's manufacturing yield of display panels drops to an unacceptably low level, according to a paper that Krusius presented at the society presentation.
A more indirect way to build flat-panel displays, especially larger than 30 inches, is to make a screen of smaller display "tiles." According to Ken Werner in the December issue of Information Display magazine, to make a screen in such a way that the seams between tiles are invisible to the human eye has challenged display designers for years.
Competing plasma-based, large-format displays that exist today are expensive and must be replaced after every one or two years of constant use due to fading and image burn-in. According to RDI's web site, the Model 3750 operates for two to three times longer than plasma-based displays and can be inexpensively serviced after years of constant use, regaining its original picture quality.
"The plans for the future are to begin volume manufacturing during the third quarter of this year," said Krusius. "The first year of manufacturing, we hope to produce something on the order of 20,000 displays and then increase production from there." The ultimate goal is for the displays to be much less expensive than plasma, said Krusius.
"One of the fundamental driving forces behind this project is that university people have an obligation to create new technology," he said. "Engineers, especially, have a social responsibility to create and develop new technology. When a new technology becomes commercially successful, it generates new businesses, more jobs, higher incomes and technological innovation that are beneficial to the region and the nation."
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