 So we had the SID display week and who are you? I'm Chris King. I was the founder of Plater Systems, which at one time was the largest American flat panel display manufacturer. We started the company in 1983 and really was the first display technology that could do really good laptop displays, really good monitors. And so it was natural for us to get involved with SID. We're always a very technically driven company and SID is where all the technology is reported and you can meet people and network of people and find out what's going on in not only the United States but in Europe and Asia. And over the years it's been so great to meet so many people here and now that I'm kind of semi-retired. It's nice to come back and not only kind of try to keep up even though I'm not actually involved but I like to follow what's going on in technology but also to meet friends that I've known for over 40 years now and interface with them and find out news about their lives and what they're doing and what technology they're excited about. So SID has just been a wonderful part of my life. For many years? 40 years. Yeah, 40 years. And you know I still volunteer on the awards committee where we try to give out SID's equivalent of the Nobel Prize for people that have made fantastic contribution. I mean when you look at what's happened in the last 40 years from displays that were on watches that you could hardly see in the sunlight to now these huge beautiful colorful TV displays that you see in Best Buy and Costco I mean it's I don't know of any technology even more as long in the IC world that has made such leaps in its capabilities as display technology has in the 40 years. So if you're not involved in SID you're really missing out on a very exciting technology development area. So did you kind of invent the laptop displays? Well we were in the really what I consider the really first good laptop displays you know the it was the first you know before they they tried to put small SRT CRTs and that wasn't really a laptop. It was impossible to do it. It looked more like you know we came from tectronics we were spin off from tectronics and it looked more like an oscilloscope than a laptop and we were It was like a thick thing that we're trying to do? Well it's kind of a rectangular box you know because the CRTs are the stick so you can't make a flat panel and really until you have flat panels you can do the kind of the folding with a keyboard in one fold and display in the other fold and how did you do that? Well it turned out that this technology we developed which was then Phil Neal had very fast response time it had good viewing angle and it was relatively power efficient. At that time LCDs which now is the dominant technology had very severe viewing angles response speed times and they were only black and white basically more gray and dark gray. So it was not LCD? No it's not LCD it's a thin film light emitting film you just buy electrical energy to it it's like I mean what has happened is EL which was inorganic when we started has now evolved to organic and so like the beautiful televisions that LG makes or the cell phones that Samsung makes are organic EL so the technologies continued in the organic field not so much in the inorganic field where we were but it's wonderful because if you LCD you have the the display itself is just a light valve you have to have a light source and you have to have color filters and you have to have filters with these electroluminescent displays they create their own lights they don't need a black light you don't need these filters they're thinner the lighter and right now they're more efficient than LCDs. So let's just walk over here for a second so it's not LCD it's not OLED it's well it's it it's electroluminescent by definition electroluminescence is the application of converting electrical energy into light energy so OLEDs are electroluminescence but they're made out of organic materials thin film EL that we worked on are made out of inorganic materials there they were they're actually kind of an evolution from a from a CRT and that the phosphors in a CRT are inorganic and so we but in a CRT you hit an electron beam to give off light we just applied electrode they're like a little capacitor you pie electrode electrical energy cross-capacitor gives off light and that's way electroluminescence work conversion of electrical energy into light energy and so what kind of laptop models were like the big famous ones back then when digital had laptops we had the first 19 inch monitors we did with deck do you remember the digital equipment company data general was another big one cured Packard had a laptop which years are we talking about right now mid-80s the mid-80s mid-80s yeah and it was really became the dominant technologies for in the 80s and then the Asians really invested in active matrix LCD and that got to be very competitive and so what EL became was a niche technology mainly for medical because medical because it still had better performance than LCD but it cost more that's more so you needed to find a market that would pay for quality and medical was our sweet spot and at one time we own like 40% of the medical market for for EL displays for patient monitors measures your heart rate UKG these quimmits that you know the play electric column the play voltage she to start a hot start a hop attack heart attack time I'm losing my yeah those machines that yeah safe people yeah from the yeah and but what does that have to do does it display on that when you well the thing was about EL it was very right it's all solid state and LCD is two pieces of glass with liquid in between it so if you press on them or if it gets too cold that liquid freezes and it doesn't work very much EL being a solid state materials are already frozen basically so it can be as cold as you want and be as hot as you want since it's just a thin film on a substrate if you press on it it doesn't distort like LCDs do and it's very rugged the military was also another big application we had most of the displays in the in the armies for tanks and portable field radials and things like that beautiful color well that was our Achilles heel we could do red and green but we had a hard time with blue we never really were able to get it as efficient blue as we wanted to why well we just couldn't work out the material science on that part of it unfortunately sometimes is like magic and it's hard to make it right and blues always hard I mean oil ad people still have trouble blues always the hardest color seems like because it's the highest energy and when you play that high of energy to a material it tends to break it apart and so the lifetime isn't as good so and that was what has been the problem with although I think they made a lot of progress on that now and maybe it's not so much a problem so maybe they have blue yeah I think maybe all ad's I think have blue whether what the lifetime is I'm not sure if you don't have blue how do you do it how do you can do it you need it you need it well the other way is you have white you put a color filter in front of it now that's what LCD does it has a white light behind the LCD and LCD is a color filter a color shutter and then you have a color filter that makes a red green and blue just by guys and so if you had figured out the blue you would have been bigger than LCD today I don't know if we would have bigger but I think we've been pretty successful and so is it kind of true to say that you were the American technology and the LCD was Asian technology or not quite well they the investments you know the original developments of both LCD and EL and plasma were done in the United States yeah but the Asians really invested multi-billions of dollars in LCD with the billions of dollars and so they became the cost leader and so it wasn't that they that they invented it but they perfected it they made manufacturing cost effective so the masses could afford it I mean our displays are always more expensive than LCDs and so we needed a high value application in order to justify that cost could have been possible that if somebody had invested billions in your technology then it would have it's possible yeah it's possible I mean like I said we weren't real successful in developing blue but maybe if we didn't have billions of dollars here so because I guess LCD realized many many things also by having those billions dollars kind of like push themselves up every time there's an issue to just find a way to fix it yeah it's amazing I mean like I said they had viewing angles they had color saturation problems they had response speed and they've managed to overcome all those things and now you know all IDs is challenging them but with addition of these quantum dots to the LCDs they're fighting back against all LEDs so I don't know who's gonna win in the end and right here the at the SID display week there's all these kind of like friends right that are all in this this business yeah I mean every you know this is a place where people can go and talk to each other and exchange ideas I mean there's certainly trade secrets that you don't talk about but there's a lot of things you can talk about and you have both personal and technical connections that you know I'm retired now but I still have these connections that I value very much to see displays are so important for humanity right this is our well if you look at our lifestyle now I mean if people didn't have their smartphone or their computer you know maybe they're looking at displays a little bit too much maybe they could be you know but it's amazing it's like so important yeah I mean again we were in the medical field I mean we made these portable instruments that people could carry in the ambulance that you know before you need a whole room for equipment to make those measurements and it's just amazing what flat panel displays have been able to how it's been able to impact how humanity can bring information to the professions and to the regular consumer I mean it's fantastic