 So we had the SID display week and then who are you all right? Well, I'm Bill Dode and I've been invited to talk at the 50th anniversary celebration and I'll be talking about polymer disperse liquid crystals and displays and I'll start it from the very beginning they were discovered by accident at the laboratory and then all the way through to their final manufacturing and a variety of different display technologies and the most popular one being the writing tablets e-writers under the great name boogie board that's So so you worked with the LCD since since a long time ago. Yes, I've been working for 35 years on LCD Oh, yes, and you came up with a cholesteric CH LCD. Yes Yes, that's when did that happen? Oh that happened the cholesteric LCD can happened around 90 1991 something like that So that's a 37 no 27 years ago. That's 27 years ago But I started 30 for 35 years ago with polymer dispersions that That that are used that are also important in cholesteric displays So one of those that you said that you started 35 years ago these are droplets of Liquor crystal the dry the liquor crystals are confined to droplets and These this is necessary for things like the boogie board the writing tablets and so on to have these polymer dispersions that that make the cholesteric work and And How does those things you were doing 35 years ago since then where did it else that they go in the display industry? Where else did they go in the LCD or well the polymer dispersion been used in quite a quite a variety of different display technologies There's displays that are called stabilized displays stabilized ferroelectric displays to stabilize STN's and so on that have been been developed by various people around the world and so They've been used in a variety of different kinds of things flexible displays. They're very important in flexible displays because they They prevent the flow of the liquor crystal where liquor crystal flows and upsets the image and with these droplets they Prevent that flow and so you can have flexible displays with these things Flexible of all kinds of different displays or only the primarily cholesterics primarily cholesteric displays because when a when they the Cholesterol display is by stable and when it flows the image doesn't come back You know you had so you don't want it to destroy the image. What does cholesteric mean? well Cholesteric is actually derived the name is derived from cholesterol. That's in your body actually that people have to keep in check People have to keep in check it turns out that that's a There's a derivative of that. That's a liquor crystal and the first liquor crystal ever discovered in 1888 was a cholesteric liquor crystal and so But however the compounds that are used today are not actually cholesterol There are other kinds of things but they have the same properties the same liquor crystal properties as Cholesterol and so they're they're still called cholesteric so So the liquor crystal there's all these liquid going around and people don't want it to go round They don't want it to flow in a particularly. Yeah, you don't want it to flow now For example if you push on your television screen if you have an LCD TV screen you put your finger and you push on it You will see the it will it will where you you'll see the liquor crystal flow and destroy that that image But it comes right back because the liquor crystal then restores its order soon You soon you relieve the pressure. Is it magnetic fields or something in there? What's going on? Well, it's a surface. It's the it's the the surface of of the Of the substrates that it's in which returns it to its normal orientation, but Can you do any displays with CH LCD? I mean, can you do like can you can you choose what you show? Yeah, yeah, how do you do that? Well? Well, the cholesteric liquor crystal is very amenable actually to To displays because because of its my stability it Allows it to have a number of features that For low particularly low-cost and reflective displays Displays that are that can that are very bright in the sunlight So cholesterol particularly good for reflective display technologies There's displays on your television center backlit displays So you founded the Ken displays. Yes. Yeah, I founded it with an investor William Manning two of us Because co-founded it and when did you do that? I was founded in 1993 and So the technology by Ken displays is it mostly about 10 inputs on the display? Well, it It started out as as displays for signs and when the company first started in the early 90s It manufactured just signs because of it It makes a great sign because you can see it in sunlight and it requires very little power Did you have many of those out? Yes, they were They're still sold today actually But but what can't display primarily focus it on today or the tablets or writing technology. It's a very highly focused on The writing experience making tablets and Blackboards very large blackboards and so on and those are sold in the millions, right? Oh, yes. Yeah Yeah And so it's a puzzle to have a product that does both where you could pen input But you could also have on-demand like like an e-book well like like a right now that right now They're primarily just in the writing mode But they can save the image you can you can write on it And then you can get pick up the image on your cell phone For example on on some of the tablets are sold with this capability and that would be from a digitizer That's combined as a digitizer on the digitizer. There's more of more and more of that coming out Yes, it is the technology is it continues to grow as time goes on All right. Yeah. All right. And here the SID display week You're going to have a speech. Yes. I have a I have a talk a 20-minute talk at this In this symposium and you were going to talk about everything that you just said. Yeah, I'll talk about this All right, cool. So in the future there could be a billions of CH LCD devices out there Well, right now they're sold in that there's millions of them out there. In fact off of this roll-to-roll line this manufacturing line there's been a linear feet of Display material that's come off this line is there's been six million six million feet of that which which translates into a thousand linear miles thousand miles of display materials so so But it's not all under the boogie board brand, right? Are you selling the displays? There's another there's another brand that comes out called the blackboard brand that That Use for that has a lot of other kinds of features associated with it and also large scaled up to large sizes So but it is is there a chance or there's no chance that we might see CH LCD like kind of like a competitor to E Inc. In terms of E readers well and at the same time have the pen input. Well the At this particular time the company is not focused on that particular on that particular thing It could sometimes hopefully sometime it could do that There the technology the technology is there for doing that making very actually really quite beautiful and bright this full-color displays and that can Quite visible in the sunlight and it's very low power It's the technology is there, but it's it's But to get it into the marketplace is gonna is it's another step That's another challenge another challenge And how about the most of the boogie boards that I've seen and I think they're awesome They're often they're always black and when you write it's kind of like green. Is it possible to make it? Oh, they make them colors now. Oh, yeah, they get them in colors Can you make it white and when you write is black you can you can make it? Yes, you can you can you can change it so that you're writing you can make you can make a Very a lot of everything colors and you can make any color combination What is the limitation? It's possible to do that right now the ones that they're in the market No, the ones that are in the market are limited to they are colors on on black or black on colors So but but black or white is a different technology for why usually the technology for white is there It's just a not in the marketplace yet. All right, so we're going to see much more much more Time goes on than the the technology clothes. All right