 SID Display Week, and who are you? I'm Fred Kahn. I'm a member of the program committee for SID. And I started working in liquid crystals before most of you were born in 1967. And liquid crystals, how does that work? And what did you do with it? Liquid crystals are a fascinating technology. Most people think there are three phases of materials, solids, liquids, and gases. But a liquid crystal is a very specific liquid. It's a liquid because it fills the container. It takes up the whole space of the container and flows like a liquid. But because of the orientation, it has rod-like molecules that tend to align parallel to each other. And this creates what we call an optically anisotropic material. And with a relatively small electric field, you can switch the liquid crystal from one state to another. So before liquid crystal devices, people used to apply thousands of volts or tens of thousands of volts to a nitro-benzene mixture in order to create an optical effect. Is that CRT? That's not even a CRT. That was just to create an optical change by changing the index or refraction of the material. But in the liquid crystal, the normal liquid molecules rotate randomly due to thermal forces. But the nature of the liquid crystal is the molecules align parallel to each other. And by applying a field, you can switch large numbers of these molecules with just a few volts. And this creates the entire world of smart phone displays, computer displays, flat panel TVs. 90% of displays is LCD, right? Roughly. Being made right now. Absolutely, yeah. Most of the world's market. When I started working in this area, the CRT was the key this way. The CRT and something called Nixie tubes. These were gas discharge tubes. But liquid crystals can switch at much lower voltages with typical semiconductors such as amorphous silicon or crystal silicon. They have taken over the display field. So I've given courses and one of my, my name is Khan. And one of Khan's laws of displays is no one display will satisfy all display applications. But over the years, starting from single pixels, liquid crystals have done so well that they now satisfy most of the world's display applications. Who invented the LCD? Ah, very interesting. Liquid crystals are very old. They were discovered in 1878 by an Austrian botanist Friedrich Rheinitzer and another German. And liquid crystal research is still very important in Germany. But it was not until the 1960s that people learned to make devices with transparent electrodes and to switch the liquid crystals. And this pioneering work was done at RCA laboratories in New Jersey in the United States. In the 60s. Yes. And when did you start working with this? I started working with this in 1967. Where, where were you? Well, I got a PhD at Harvard. My specialty was solid state physics and optical properties of materials. And I had put off foreign travel. And I had turned down many jobs abroad. And I decided before I took a full-time job in the U.S. I should travel. So I decided to work in a country that was technologically different and culturally, excuse me, technologically advanced and culturally different from the United States. So I did a worldwide search and I decided I'm Japan. So you went to Japan. What year? I arrived in Japan in December 1968. And I was supposed to work on some novel display devices that was being pursued in the NEC research laboratory in Kawasaki, Japan. But when I arrived I was told that those devices were not going to be important because the electrical domains were too large. And I had intended for those semiconductor devices to switch the liquid crystals. But my department manager called me into his office the first day and said, you know, those devices are not going to work because the semiconductor part is, it has too low a resolution. But you mentioned liquid crystals. So why don't you work on them? And so I have been working in the area of liquid crystals since December 1968. It was a very improbable technology. Nobody knew how to make or at least a non-proprietary room temperature material. They didn't know the effects that would be important. But it was interesting and I said, hey, if they're going to pay me to do this, I'll work on it until I find something better. And here we are from 1968 to 2017 and I'm still working on liquid crystals. So did it feel like a world that you could conquer or did it feel like something that could not be, like, did you know what you were doing? The future, one of the companies I worked at worked for since that time was Hewlett Packard. And at Hewlett Packard, I was in Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. And Bill Hewlett, the founder of Hewlett Packard, taught me that the future is based on a series of small steps. And I started on these small steps in December 1968. And I am still taking small steps, having developed the first technology for Hewlett Packard calculator displays. One of the earliest notebook computers starting the first company to make ultra high definition liquid crystal projection displays and now helping other people. And each year I come back to the Society for Information Display International Supposium, now called Display Week, and being held this week in Los Angeles, California. And I fill myself up on the emerging technology and all the new things and network with all these guys over there. Network with people from all over the world working in the same or related fields. And then we all leave and we go on to do our own thing. And I make a business of helping other people. So did you invent L-Cos and something else? More than half of all HDTVs and 4KTVs? Well, actually some of the earliest L-Cos work was done at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York. And I was a consultant to them. But in the early 70s I invented something called the vertically aligned nematic liquid crystal. I hold the U.S. patent on that. And that material, you can call it the VAN LCD, VAN for vertically aligned nematic. At that time there were no applications but I felt that there was a need for a field effect liquid crystal display, a voltage switch liquid crystal which would have high contrast. And by the early 2000s the VAN became responsible for over 50% of the world's flat panel televisions and also by a very prominent company named Sony that you may have heard of. Sony called their technology SX-RD which stands for Silicon Crystal Reflective Display. But that used my VAN. And they have made some very nice high definition theater projectors using that technology in competition with Texas Instruments digital light processing. So how does the L-Cos compare with DLP? Which one is better? They are both very good. But I believe DLP has the largest market share today. How did they manage to do that? Well, it was extraordinary because I was consulting for the IBM L-Cos activity which had been started by a very prominent IBM scientist named Robert Miltcher. And I had committed by 1990 to becoming technology agnostic. And one of my other clients was Texas Instruments. And I would tell Dr. Miltcher that using non-proprietary information of course that the TI DLP was going to be able to do this and that. And they said no way. It is too complex and too improbable. But TI was committed to this technology invented by Larry Hornbeck who became a senior fellow at TI. And they used a single crystal silicon substrate. And they used it to address, instead of liquid crystals, they used it to address mirrors, micro mirrors. Millions of mirrors that shift very quickly, right? Yes, in the words of Carl Saigon, millions and millions of mirrors. So L-Cos is not a bunch of mirrors. It's using, how does it work? L-Cos is a reflective liquid crystal display made on a silicon matrix and the silicon matrix applies an appropriate voltage to each pixel element. And using polarizers, it converts the image of the switched liquid crystal into varying light levels. So using three L-Cos devices, you can make a full color display. TI DLP works a little differently. They use a rapidly switchable array of mirrors, also switched by silicon. And either they can use color sequential light in order to create a full color image or like L-Cos, they can use three DLP's in order to create the image, a full color image. Both of these are very improbable technologies that at the beginning no one would have predicted the immense success that they have. But by taking a series of short-term steps, both have succeeded. In the case of L-Cos, these steps have been made by large numbers of worldwide companies. In the case of TI DLP, they choose to do almost everything themselves. Making the chips? Yes. And shipping them? And not sharing the technology to make the chips with anyone else. And they have the support of their top management, which is very important in creating such a strategic activity. So in your home you've had a whole bunch of L-Cos projectors over the time? Say that again. You have a lot of L-Cos projectors at home that you actually use? Have been using? Actually, I am a very cost-sensitive consumer. So I enjoy pursuing the leading edge. And so actually I have a Sanyo projection liquid crystal display, which projects a 93-inch diagonal image. And it was very cost-effective, much lower cost than the equivalent L-Cos projector. Is it for cocaine? The performance is not as good, but for me at home it is good enough. I also have a large screen plasma display using the last extraordinarily high-performance plasma display made by Panasonic before they got out of the business. And they could not compete cost-effectively with liquid crystals, but they made superb quality displays that many in the industry have at home because they realized that the extra money was buying them extraordinary quality. Now there are no more plasma flat panels made. Liquid crystals have replaced them. OLEDs are trying to replace the liquid crystal, but by incorporating quantum dots on the liquid crystal flat panel, you can achieve OLED TV performance at liquid crystal prices. So it is very attractive in your big box stores. How does quantum dots work? Sorry I am asking too many questions. Quantum dots is a very exciting technology. A lot of new developments will be presented here at Display Week. But basically a quantum dot, and this technology evolved out of MIT if I remember correctly, a quantum dot is a phosphor and blue light from an LED is incident on the quantum dot phosphor. And depending on the diameter of the quantum dot, you can emit either green light or red light. So many of the quantum dot TVs use the blue light from the LED and the red and green light from the quantum dot in order to achieve much higher color gamut than can be achieved with the ordinary RGB filters that are used in standard TVs. So as the story with plasma, maybe the story might be with OLED, but it's hard to compete with LCD. LCD is just so big and there's just so many forces in the LCD business. Absolutely. OLEDs have attracted a great deal of attention. It's a very exciting display. People like it because it has extraordinary color quality. It has very high contrast and it can be very thin. One of the latest displays from LG, which is the major producer of OLED TVs, is something called a wallpaper display. And this is held on your wall by magnets. And it's like wallpaper. It's extremely thin and people are very excited by it. On the other hand, it is very expensive. And with quantum dots, which some people call them LED TVs, there is no such thing as an LED TV. The LED is the backlight used in the liquor crystal and the LED quantum dot gives even better color quality to the standard LED TVs. They're trying to print the OLED and make it very cheap, right? Do you think they're going to succeed? That's very interesting. Roughly 10 years ago, I think Epson was making printed OLED displays and said they would introduce a very low-price, 40-inch diagonal OLED TV using printing technology. We are still waiting. Things in this industry take a long time sometimes. You're used to waiting, right? Hurry up and wait. Yes. The thing that takes the longest is new materials. The time frame on new materials is typically five years or more. Electronics can be made faster, maybe six to twelve months. Software can be made even faster, maybe one to three months. And then everything has to be perfected. You have to have feasibility demos. You have to have production prototypes. You have to develop a supply chain if it's a new area. And you have to qualify purchasers. And all this can take five years or more for a brand new technology. But sometimes, isn't it just a question of cash? Somebody needs to come in with a billion dollars and it will happen. Well, money talks, but sometimes it doesn't talk that fast. But money is talking right now in mainland China, in People's Republic of China. Because they have a very interesting financial system that the central government can make relatively small loans to people wanting to create production facilities. And then the local regional governments make maybe five times larger loans. And as a result, you wind up with multiple five, six billion dollar manufacturing facilities for LCD TVs and also for OLEDs. And China is trying to go very rapidly into mass OLED production. But the major market for OLEDs is in smartphones and small displays. And one of the major markets for LCDs is in the large area TVs because they are very, very, very cost effective and consumers are very, very cost sensitive. Now I can get a 4K HDR LCD TV amazing for less than a thousand dollars, right? And two years later it will be like half or something. That is a great bargain. Everybody should buy something like this, right? Everybody is buying in the U.S. especially. That depends. And why do I say that depends? I am very excited by 4K and 8K LCDs because they are a very good marketing tool to sell TVs. But the fact is that at a typical consumer viewing distance of maybe 10 feet for a 55 or 60 inch diagonal display and excuse me for saying this, all commercial companies, HD 1080p, 1080 lines is probably good enough. In order to appreciate and see the pixels for 4000 lines you have to be within a few feet of the display and very few people will regularly view their 4K display at that distance. So if you go into a store like Best Buy you see up close the extreme image quality but as the typical consumer you don't realize that when you get at home you're really not going to be able to see all those individual pixels. People are welcome to watch this video as in 4K and people are welcome to walk up to their 4K TV and see it up close. Hopefully it's impressive. But one thing you get with your 4K TVs is probably either an HDR. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range which increases the available range of brightness between the brightest and the darkest pixels about a factor of two from the standard display. So when you buy your 4K TV probably the more important thing is to having something that is HDR display or at least HDR compatible and maybe WCG as well which stands for Wide Color Gamut and those will increase your viewing experience even from 10 foot away. And Quantum Dots is also good option. Quantum Dots, I gave a talk five years ago to a local SID group and I told them that OLEDs were going to be very important for small area displays which has happened but LCDs were more cost effective and Quantum Dots and the commercialization of the Quantum Dot technology now provides OLED comparable performance at LCD prices. So an OLED TV of the same resolution will cost probably 40 to 100 percent more than your LCD TV. And so with the Quantum Dots you can get this performance at home and save enough money to have a nice mini vacation. So thanks a lot for doing this interview and here at the SID Display Week hopefully you'll have some interesting conversations with the people from the industry and something amazing. Every year, is he something amazing at the show? I am semi-retired but I spend 25 percent of my time helping other clients and involved in intellectual property and I enjoy coming to SID every year to suck in the new technology and to discuss it with my colleagues from all over the world.