Seminars

Paper-like displays can change their reflectivity, do not require a backlight, and have excellent properties in a bright environment. The technology is based on charged ink particles that move in a liquid under the influence of an electric field. The (colored) particles can be hidden from view, absorb light, or reflect incident light. This seminar will address the charging of particles, the transport of particles in an electric field, and the optical properties of an electronic-ink device. The principle of electrophoresis can be used in electronic ink displays, surfaces with modified appearances, or smart windows.

Kristiaan Neyts is professor at Ghent University in Belgium, where he heads the liquid crystals and photonics group in the department of electronics and information systems. His research focuses on the physics and applications of electro-optical materials, such as liquid crystals, organic LEDs, electrophoresis, and piezo-electric materials. The application of this research can be found in the domains of displays, flat optical components, and smart windows. He is co-author of more than 250 journal papers and 10 patents, and has been the promotor of more than 25 completed Ph.Ds.

Moderator: Ion Bita, Google

The unique advantages of reflective e-Paper displays (paper-like appearance, sunlight readability, low energy) have allowed applications far beyond the original generation of e-Readers. Now widely used in achromatic reading devices, e-Paper’s next frontier is reflective color. Attendees will first get an introduction to the basic optical principles of reflective displays and current methods of making them colorful. Then there will be an overview of how to use newly developed industry standards to correctly evaluate the optical and color performance of reflective displays in realistic ambient viewing environments. The fundamental advantages of reflective vs. emissive displays in terms of paper similarity and eye safety will also be quantified.

Dirk Hertel is principal scientist at E Ink Corp., working on reflective color display technologies and modeling, display metrology, and optical display measurement standards. He serves as an expert in IEC TC110 standard working groups and is a contributor to current standardization projects for ICDM and ISO 9241-300. His previous R&D experience include color night vision with near-infrared sensitivity (Melexis), wide-dynamic-range imaging (Sensata Technologies), camera phone image quality (Cypress Semiconductor), digital color printing (Polaroid), and silver halide imaging science (Kodak Ltd., U.K., and IAPP Dresden, Germany). He received his physics degree and Ph.D. for imaging research from the Technical University Dresden (Germany), and is a member of SID, IS&T, Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC), The Colour Group (Great Britain), and the German Society for Photography (DGPh).

Moderator: Khaled Ahmed, Intel

Cholesteric liquid crystals (CLCs) possess a periodic helical structure and exhibit a selective reflection. The wavelength and bandwidth are determined by the helical pitch and birefringence of the liquid crystal. They also exhibit two stable states at 0 V: a reflecting planar state and a non-reflecting focal conic state. The combination of the reflectivity and bistability makes them a unique candidate for many applications, such as reflective displays, switchable mirrors, smart windows, and temperature sensors. Furthermore, they can be encapsulated to make flexible displays. A wide variety of stimuli, such as electricity, mechanical pressing, temperature, and light, can be used to modulate the reflection of CLCs. CLC reflective displays do not need polarizers and can be multiplexed without an active matrix. This technology has the advantages of high reflection, energy savings, flexibility and wearability, mechanical ruggedness, and low manufacturing cost.

Deng-Ke Yang is a professor in the department of physics and the material science program in advanced materials, as well as the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University. He received his B.S. in physics from Tsinghua University in China in 1984 and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Hawaii in 1989. He joined Kent State University in 1989. His main research interest is in liquid-crystal physics and devices. He has coauthored three books and 10 book chapters. He also has published more than 200 papers in refereed journals and SID proceedings. He holds more than 30 patents. Yang received the Society for Information Display’s Special Recognition Award in 2005 for his pioneering work on polymer-stabilized cholesteric devices and reflective displays. He was elected a fellow of the SID in 2007 for his significant scientific and technological contributions to bistable, reflective cholesteric displays and to polymer-stabilized cholesteric devices, and for his outstanding contributions to education in the field of liquid-crystal technology. He received SID’s Slottow-Owaki Prize in 2017 for his outstanding contributions to the education and training of students and professionals in the field of liquid-crystal displays. Yang also received Kent State University’s annual Outstanding Research and Scholarship Award in 2017. He has been named one of the world’s top 2% of scientists by Stanford University.

Moderator: Lu Lu, Facebook

Bright light performance is the main differentiator for outdoor display technologies. LCD, LED, MicroLED, and e-paper will be presented and discussed in this seminar, including their sweet spots for outdoor applications. Further topics of this workshop are optical evaluation and application requirements.

Karlheinz Blankenbach, has three decades of experience in displays. From 1988 until 1995 he was with AEG-MIS (a DAIMLER subsidiary) in Germany, developing display electronics, e-signage LCDs, and software. In 1995 he was appointed to full professor at Pforzheim University, Germany, where he founded the university's Display Lab. His main R&D activities are (automotive) display topics such as optical measurements, display systems, evaluations, HMI, and LEDs, as well as display hardware and software. Blankenbach is a member of the Society for Information Display’s program subcommittee, Automotive/Vehicular Displays and HMI Technologies, and a member of SID’s International Committee for Display Metrology. He has served as a member of the board of the Displayforum (DFF) since 2000; after nine years as chairman he was appointed to honorary chairman in 2020.

Moderator: Arokia Nathan, Darwin College, Cambridge University

Flexibility is the one attribute that has eluded LCD in its conventional inorganic TFT-based form. This is because from a manufacturing perspective the high temperatures of inorganic TFT processes (silicon or oxide) create major challenges when applied to plastic instead of glass. In addition, from a product performance perspective there is a very particular set of optical requirements demanded of the substrate, as well as the need to maintain a uniform cell gap in order to avoid any performance trade-offs compared to glass LCD. In this seminar, the challenges and requirements for manufacturable flexible LCD will be explained from process and optical performance perspectives. Organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) will be described as a means of overcoming these challenges and enabling LCD to be manufactured on plastic films with no loss in performance compared to glass (organic LCD). Attributes and applications for flexible LCD will be explained, along with production process and materials for OLCD manufacture. Aside from flexibility, other advantages of building flexible LCD on ultra-thin plastic substrates will also be explained, which directly lead to innovations such as completely borderless displays (folded borders), and breakthrough dual-cell OLCD structures. Finally, other uses of plastic LC cells beyond displays will be explained.

Paul Cain is strategy director at FlexEnable Ltd., a worldwide leader in the development of organic materials and manufacturing processes. Paul has 20 years’ experience in the flexible organic electronics and displays industries, in both technical and strategic management roles. He has a deep technical and industry knowledge of flexible display technologies and companies. Paul has taken new flexible display technologies from lab to fab to commercial product, and has 25 patents relating to processes and architectures that enable the high-yield manufacture of flexible displays. Paul has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from London Business School.

Moderator: Takahiro Ishinabe, Tohoku University

Skin is the body’s largest organ. It is also responsible for the transduction of a vast amount of information. This conformable, stretchable, self-healable, and biodegradable material simultaneously collects signals from external stimuli that translate into information such as pressure, pain, and temperature. The development of electronic materials inspired by the complexity of this organ is a tremendous, unrealized materials challenge. The advent of organic-based electronic materials may offer a potential solution to this longstanding problem. Over the past decade, we have developed material design concepts to add skin-like functions to organic electronic materials without compromising their electronic properties. These new materials and devices have enabled a broad array of new applications in displays, circuits, medical devices, robotics, and wearable electronics. This presentation will discuss recent progress in the above areas.

Zhenan Bao is department chair and K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering, and by courtesy, a professor of chemistry and a professor of material science and engineering at Stanford University. She founded the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiate (eWEAR) in 2016 and serves as the faculty director. Prior to joining Stanford in 2004, she was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, from 1995-2004. She received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1995. She has over 550 refereed publications and over 65 US patents with a Google Scholar H-Index >160. Bao is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors. She was selected as Nature’s ten people who mattered in 2015 as a “Master of Materials” for her work on artificial electronic skin. She has received the inaugural ACS Central Science Disruptor and Innovator Prize in 2020, the Gibbs Medal from the Chicago Session of ACS in 2020, and the Wilhelm Exner Medal from the Austrian Federal Minister of Science in 2018, in addition to many other awards. Bao is a co-founder and on the board of directors for C3 Nano and PyrAmes, Silicon Valley venture-funded start-ups. She also serves as an advising partner for Fusion Venture Capital.

Moderator: Ze Yuan, Apple

This seminar will review the integration of thin-film transistor sensor interfaces for newly emerging application areas. We will discuss critical design considerations to show how device-circuit interactions should be handled and how compensation methods can be implemented for stable and reliable operation. In particular, the quest for low power becomes highly compelling in wearable devices and biosensors. We will discuss device operation in different regimes, and review device properties when operated in the deep sub-threshold regime or in near-OFF state, addressing the pivotal requirement of low supply voltage and ultra-low power leading to potentially battery-less operation of sensor systems.

Arokia Nathan is a leading pioneer in the development and application of thin-film transistor technologies for flexible electronics, displays, and sensor systems. After earning his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Alberta, Canada, in 1988, he joined LSI Logic USA and subsequently the Institute of Quantum Electronics, ETH Zürich, Switzerland, before joining the electrical and computer engineering department at University of Waterloo, Canada. In 2006, he joined the London Centre for Nanotechnology, University College London, as the Sumitomo Chair of Nanotechnology. He moved to Cambridge University in 2011 as the Chair of Photonic Systems and Displays, and he is currently a bye-fellow and tutor at Darwin College. He has more than 600 publications, including four books, and more than 110 patents and four spin-off companies. He is a fellow of IEEE, a distinguished lecturer of IEEE’s Electron Device Society and Sensor Council, a chartered engineer (UK), a fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (UK), and winner of the 2020 IEEE EDS JJ Ebers Award.

Moderator: Jim Zhuang, Facebook

Wearable display technology is rapidly evolving. However, given that wearable displays are manufactured on hard or plastic substrates, they are not comfortable when worn on the human body, and are limited to one component of an electronic device worn on the body. In order to realize a true wearable display, one approach is to create the display on fabric or thread. This seminar covers how to fabricate OLEDs and TFTs on fabrics and on threads to create a true wearable textile display.

Kyung Cheol Choi received his Ph.D. from Seoul National University in 1993. He is currently a professor with the school of electrical engineering, KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea. His major research areas are flexible, stretchable, and wearable display devices.

Moderator: George Zhaojun Liu, Southern University of Science and Technology

This seminar will present a couple of activities that are important for new types of displays. The first is producing the optical waveguide combiners, based on diffractive optical elements, which are needed for successfully making smart glasses and AR devices. We will give an introduction to waveguide combiners based on diffractive optics, discuss the techniques that can be used to make the subwavelength structures, and show results for prototypes. The second involves OLED displays, which are incredibly colorful, efficient, and bright, but could be a lot more energy efficient if you could improve the optical outcoupling of the light without losing your resolution. At this moment less than 20% of the light that is generated is actually coupled out to the world. For OLED lighting, successful schemes have been developed to make this process more efficient; however, the techniques employed would ruin the resolution of the display. Together with Professor CC Wu and his group at National Taiwan University, we have been working on new OLED pixel structures that will substantially improve the outcoupling while not causing any light leakage from one pixel to the next. Results of simulations and experiments will be shown.

Robert Jan Visser is vice president of the CTO group of Applied Materials, Inc. He is responsible for creating business opportunities in new and adjacent markets related to future displays, optics for AR and VR, advanced IC packaging, bio-engineering, and quantum information technology. For more than 30 years, Visser has pioneered the research and commercialization of display technologies related to thin-film transistors, LCD materials, barrier films (including encapsulation materials), OLEDs, and flexible displays. Prior to joining Applied in 2009, he was CTO of Vitex Systems from 2002 to 2009, where he worked on thin-film encapsulation of OLED displays. The company was sold to Samsung. Visser also spent 18 years in various roles at Philips Research, including as CEO and CTO of the polyLED business. He received his Ph.D. from Leiden University (NL) in physical chemistry in 1984 and his M.S. in theoretical organic chemistry and physics in 1979. In 2015 he and his Vitex and PNNL colleagues received a Flexi Award for their work on thin-film encapsulation. He received a Special Award from the Society for Information Display in 2016 for his work on OLED and thin-film encapsulation and was elected a fellow of the SID in 2020.

Moderator: Casey Kang, Corning Incorporated

In this seminar, state-of-the-art technology development in oxide semiconductors and devices will be reviewed. Since the invention of IGZO by Prof. Hosono in 2004, the development of IGZO TFTs has been accelerated by material optimization, processing conditions, and careful architecture designs such as self-aligned structures. The baseline of the current IGZO backplane for AMOLED will be addressed, including architecture and process optimization. An in-depth discussion on the origin of photo-bias instabilities of oxide TFTs, which is critical for their implementation in AMOLED products, will also be provided. Finally, the potential application of oxide TFTs into monolithic three-dimensional devices will be suggested, which can be a critical ingredient for future sensing and IoT systems.

Jae Kyeong Jeong received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in material science and engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1997, 1999, and 2002, respectively. In 2003, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined Samsung SDI Corp. as a senior engineer in 2004, where he performed research regarding the design and characterization of poly-Si and IGZO TFTs for AMOLED displays. In 2008, he successfully developed the world largest 12.1-in. oxide-TFT-driven AMOLED display as a project leader. The paper reporting this work was selected for a Distinguished Paper Award at Display Week 2008. In 2009, he joined Inha University in Incheon, Korea, as an assistant professor, where he continued work in metal-oxide semiconductors and related field-effect transistors. Since September 2015, he has been a professor in the department of electronic engineering at Hanyang University. He has more than 165 authored SCI journal papers and 112 international patents. He is an editorial board member for Scientific Reports and Journal of Information Display. He has received many awards, including a Merck Young Scientist Award (2012) and a President Award from KDIA (2014).

Moderator: Hsing-Hung Hsieh, HP Inc.

OLED-on-silicon microdisplays have been around for more than 20 years, especially for niche applications including defense, medical, and industrial. With the recent advent of AR/VR applications, the significance of microdisplays, particularly OLED-on-silicon microdisplays, has come to the forefront. In fact, with recent brightness and other improvements, OLED-on-silicon microdisplays are considered the technology of choice for today’s AR/VR applications. This seminar will start with discussing the basics of OLED-on-silicon microdisplays and will lead up to the state-of-the-art of this technology. Many aspects of the technology will be covered, including backplane, OLED stack, high brightness, and color gamut, all with AR/VR applications in mind.

Amal Ghosh received his Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and joined IBM T.J. Watson Research Center as a research staff member. Subsequently, he joined FED Corporation, which is now eMagin Corporation. He has held many positions at eMagin and is currently the COO of the company. He has also held positions at Eastman Kodak Company. Ghosh is a pioneer in developing the OLED-on-silicon microdisplay technology. He has received numerous awards and recognition for his work, including SID’s Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize, SID’s Special Recognition Award, SID’s Fellow designation, a Mid-Atlantic Chapter Service award, and the Korean Information Display Society’s Special Recognition award. He was the president of SID from 2014 to 2016. He has held numerous other positions at SID including program and general chair of Display Week, chapter director and chapter chair.

Moderator: Ian Underwood, University of Edinburgh