 So we had the SID display week, and who are you? Roger Stewart. So what do you do? A designer of liquid crystal displays, and kind of an amateur historian as to what happened in the industry. So I think it's been exciting. We've gone from permitted devices back in the 1970s and 80s, and now I think we're in the verge of making the perfect displays. The Dolby Vision displays, which can show everything that I can see. And that's LCD, all that? It's all LCD, yes. So why LCD? Why has LCD won this war? How did LCD manage all these years? LCD is a chemistry, but it's also electronics. There's an active transistor at every pixel, and that improves the quality immensely. And so it's been a revolution, and it's been fun to be part of it. Everyone owns one in their house, so it's kind of fun to help develop something which everyone knows about and has. So which part did you develop? What did you do? I developed the devices, amorphous silicon, polysilicon devices. And the one thing I did, individually, one award for was developing electronics that go around the edge of the display to scan it. In other words, if you're going to have transistors, if you need them inside the display, once you have transistors, then it's very helpful to use the same transistors on the edge of the display to get rid of all the electronics that you otherwise spend money on. You've got a smaller, nice... If you look at the new displays, they have a very narrow edge. The plate is almost all display. If you look at them from 20 years ago, they used to have a big mullion on the edge, which was useless, and now that's gone. So what you did helped to have smaller bezels, or it was bigger bezels in the past, because there was a whole bunch of electronics? There are electronics in there, and we've eliminated all those electronics, and now we've filled the entire plate with a display surface. You're talking about a chart... What does that chart show? What does it talk about? The history of the LCD? Tomorrow is going to be 50 years? Yes, it is. That's 50 years of history of liquid crystal displays, and this was also a 50-year history of a society of information display. That started with the LCD. The society began earlier. It was cathode ray tubes, the old tube television. But we're having another anniversary tomorrow, and I'll be there. I'm looking forward to seeing it. But the liquid crystals are now that age, and I did a history of what's happened with liquid crystals over the last 50 years. I don't want to take too much of your time, because maybe you have to go, but is it possible to try to explain what happened? Who started some of the important parts bits on the chart that is it too much to... I'll give you a short version. The founder of liquid crystal television was George Hallmeyer, who preceded me at RCA laboratories. I never really got to work with him, but he was the inventor of liquid crystal television. And it... it proceeded. I mean, people had the calculators rolled on just with liquid crystals. No fancy electronics or anything just using liquid crystals. But you couldn't do color. You couldn't scale it to make it high resolution. The bigger you made it, the lower the quality was. And the problem was, chemists were trying to work on making the materials better. And then people like myself who were the electronics guys were trying to say, okay, we're going to use electronics to fix the problems in the chemistry. And so our solution was horribly expensive. And there was a big argument for about 10 years. And we eventually won. So horribly expensive in the beginning where the price got down with kind of like Moore's Law when the electronics gets cheaper. It did, but the problem was Moore's Law was easy because you just need to make more transistors for the same money. But you did that by making them smaller. In this case, we had to take the integrated circuit technology and make it huge. We had to make these displays instead of small little integrated circuits. We had to make displays which can be 10 feet by 8 feet in size. And so we built the work we had to build whole new technology and whole new factories in order to make these crazy transistors. And this is why the chemists didn't want to go that way. But the electrical engineers won out and we did solve those problems. The new factories cost five billion dollars each. Why did you build them? Because it produces a much better quality display. But where did you build them? We built some smaller ones in the United States. But most of them now are in Japan or Korea or in Taiwan. Were they the first ones to invest the five billion dollars required to make a big factory? Yes. So they put the money in and they saw the potential and they had what they called patient capital. Japan was the first country that did that. The Americans were trying to make 30% return on investment whereas the Japanese were willing to build a factory for 5% return on investment, ROI. And wait 10 years to get the money back and we'll be fine. In a way they didn't care. They didn't care just about money. They cared about becoming the dominant leader. And so Japan was a winner. But in the end Japan was pushed out ironically by Korea who has long been a rival of Japan all the way back to the World War II. And so the Koreans enjoyed competing with Japan and taking away market share. So now Japan only has maybe 5% market share and Korea has 40% market share. Has it got something to do with cheaper labor and you come in and you have cheaper labor and now China is coming with cheaper labor and they want to take it over from Korea? Or is it not to do with that? The factories are so expensive the labor hardly matters. When you're spending $5 billion on a factory and you're only going to have 100 employees then it really doesn't what you really want is the factory to run well. And so it's a very hard the Japanese were good the Koreans were better and now it looks like mainland China is going to give them all a run for the money. Mainland China is trying very hard to dominate this industry. It's $120 billion a year. Because everybody like the USA, Japan, Korea and China everybody has 5 billion now. How do you figure out who's the best at investing it? It's not just money you have to have a culture you have to have you have a whole infrastructure and it's estimated now to enter the business you'd have to spend $50 billion and lose money for the first 10 years. And so Japan was willing to do that Korea was willing to do that Taiwan was willing to do that and now mainland China is willing to do it and they want to be the leaders in the world it's not just money there's passion there So you were the RCA I was with RCA and RCA has a very long history in making TVs right since what was it was the CRT TVs before and then they wanted to get into LCD you tried and then but there's so many words that go together with LCD people talk about active matrix active matrix the active matrix that's the electronics part that's what you mean that's the transistor we added the transistor active matrix and then everybody's using that every LCD is active matrix since long time 20 years and what is this TFT who did that that's the type of the active matrix the transistor is called a thin film transistor and so that was my area of expertise I was interested in solid state physics and I became an expert in odd transistors and these thin film transistors are really the worst transistors that you could ever imagine the worst the worst transistors ever invented by mankind for humankind they're terrible but they're cheap the key thing was to take a technology we had to find a way to make these at a thousand times cheaper than they were made before and so we had to and that was my expertise I became an expert in designing circuits with the worst transistors in the world for experts in lowering I'm sure you saw some very expensive prototypes in all these places prototypes cost a fortune like millions of dollars more than a house and you had to bring it down to thousands that was your job and we had to make electronics sophisticated electronics with transistors that any self-respecting designer would say is impossible so I was specialized all my life in doing the impossible so my expertise was to take transistors that were so bad no one felt they could do anything with them and find a way to do circuit design with them so it's got to be pretty awesome right that people say it's impossible and you just make it happen they paid me I had a contract with the French for eight million dollars for five years to do this and they fed me well French eat well Thompson, grand public Thompson and RCA kind of like the brand are they kind of together right yes RCA was sold to Thompson sold to Thompson and so they're a French company that also made televisions and so they kind of brought some people into their company to help them with design and research and development that's what I did and there's a laboratory somewhere you sit down you do these things my laboratory was in Princeton, New Jersey which was that's the historical site of the RCA laboratories that's where David Sarnoff himself founded that laboratory so I love that laboratory and we did a lot of good work there is that where you from also yes and was it colleagues all these people you worked on these things wonderful colleagues very good environment and I was Thompson gave me enough money I could build my own laboratory to work for Thompson and so I hired creative people and I was good at managing creative people in fact people would say all the time this is impossible and I had a rule it says you're not allowed to say it's impossible unless we have a party first a party party always had had a party like just party that's right we would take everybody out away from the office and we go to a motel and we would pick half a dozen of the most creative engineers I could find and we would get away from the office and we would brainstorm about how to solve this problem and I did it typically once every six months I would have insist on a party and every time I did I was able to find not just one but typically three or four solutions to any problem they brought up so we became very good at solving problems that no one else could solve and so that's how I built my laboratory how do you build a laboratory there's a lot of cool tools in the laboratory but mainly it was people just people like office desks like it looks like a normal office yeah it did but we hired Sarnoff was a wonderful place to work and I was privileged to be able to pay people decent salaries and we hired people from all over the world and again I knew how to manage creativity I was taught that in my work at Westinghouse so I learned how to run a creative operation I personally have 130 personal patents so I'm a very prolific inventor myself and within my laboratory we had many many more so we were very good inventors so a lot of the business model is to get the idea to make it work and then license it to many different companies so it was all about using within the Thompson RCA Westinghouse brands my goal there was just to make Thompson Grand Public successful they were treating me very well they funded my laboratory for 10 years and I felt my job was to try to help them as much as I could so did you feel like you had the coolest job in the world at that point? yes better than the president or what? because the president is not venturing just talking on TV or something right? yes I think we all have to work and that means doing things that other people need sometimes we're very lucky and we get to work on something we really enjoy and those times are special and they happen a few times in our life but which years are you talking about this lab that you built in the 10 years and all that stuff? when is that? 1990 to 2000 and then what happened after that? the work began to dry up it became harder by that time it was clear the United States was not going to be a player in flat panel displays which was sad I did everything I could I worked for DARPA and other people trying very hard to get the United States to compete with Japan but in the end we couldn't and so once that transition happened then all the research and development dried up and so I went out to California to do startup companies and find other ways to use my creativity tech tech startups you didn't start google or something or that right? which one do you do? first startup company was serif and then second was alien technology and then I found a third one called Intelliflux and worked for a fourth startup company called Aywood what kind of products were they doing? what are they doing? serif was going to make displays so he started a company to do that that's funded heavily with the government and then alien was going to make displays too but changed his mind and made an RFID and it still does that so that was a pretty big success and then Intelliflux makes long range RFID and Aywood made RFID readers and then after that I started my own company and so I formed sourland mountain which does patent consulting for some 70 companies worldwide to help them turn their ideas into real stuff is that what you do? some of that I also do a lot of litigation I've been asked to serve as an expert witness in litigation the Asian companies now fight with each other so Japan is fighting with Taiwan is fighting with Korea and it would be now but at the time the battles were between those three countries and so that's what I did but you were saying it's sad that the US didn't become a player in the displays of course it's sad but how about Europe what does Europe do? they did worse than we did there's nothing? it's only in Asia I thought there were creative people in Europe it's a very hard technology to master and I think the Asians did a very good job they wanted to do it more than we did and so they worked hard and they had lots of they call it patient capital and that's helped them a lot so in the future it's going to be exciting right? more and more stuff it's exciting I think this displays are exciting I think what you're going to see in the next 5 to 10 years are displays that look so good that people will not be able to distinguish between the display and reality and it's never happened so that will be a breakthrough what TV do you have? Do you have OLED? I have an OLED backlight and an active matrix liquid crystal display from Sharp OLED backlight OLED backlight it's a LED backlight inorganic so you got an LCD TV I have an LCD TV you don't want to get an OLED? one of those LG OLED TVs? I wouldn't mind but I think liquid crystals can do higher levels of brightness and they can be blacker if you're in a really dark room then it doesn't matter as much but if there's ambient light in the room then you want the screen to be as dark as possible so you don't watch out your blacks and liquid crystals are brighter and they are darker so there's better for the HDR kind of stuff? yes that's exactly right so I think what happened is that organic light emitting diodes they were really exciting and they forced the liquid crystal industry to scramble and to do a better job if they hadn't done that I think they will have left a prominent mark on the industry but right now 99% of television displays are LCD very few of them are active matrix organic light emitting diodes so either will work in a way you won't care as long as you have a wonderful looking image you don't care whether it's liquid crystal or organic light emitting diode what you do need the revolution you need high resolution so you can't see the pixels you need high dynamic range with dimming the backlight locally and then you need better color gamut you need to show all the colors that can be perceived by the human eye right now television you can only see about half the colors the other half cannot be captured by print, by television by camera, by any means at all and that's about to change and that's exciting about to change thanks to the new HDR TVs or what that's high dynamic range it's part of it, it's not all of it what you also need is much pure primaries all a liquid crystal can do is either let the light through or not but if you don't have highly saturated light in the first place then you can't create highly saturated images is that what they're upgrading the latest upgrades to the LCD what do you call it called quantum dot that's why they're doing that that's the quantum dot you can get almost twice as many colors as quantum dots and then you can also use multi primaries you don't have to just use three you can use six or eight or whatever and you can actually capture all colors that can be perceived by the human eye the primary is important the primary makes the color marker or well if you kind of vision all colors can be shown what they call it's CIE Diagram and you can you'd like to be able to show all of those colors and you can't now you can only show about half of them and so that's the newest revolution is to show almost twice as many colors you can now with your latest company I imagine you're still looking at the latest labs out there right you visit and you get to see all the latest stuff that they're inventing yes and so how does that compare to the labs you had oh the labs are much better I think how? what's different they have hundreds or thousands of people working in those laboratories so they're hundreds of thousands hundreds or thousands you were just like dozens or I was just most dozen people the laboratory I had at Sarnoff was bigger about 40 people but there are just maybe thousands of people how did they all work together on the same kind of like goals and stuff that's called a research laboratory you have to manage it the RCA labs was a great research laboratory IBM had a great research laboratory Xerox Park in California there are a lot of great research centers just no one wants to pay for them in the United States anymore and the system with patents and everything is great or would it be better if everything was just like some kind of open source thing where everybody could maybe China has another idea than patents I don't know like doing things differently you want to encourage if you want to encourage invention then you have to give the inventor some chance to win and if they don't have patents then big companies will just squash all your new little start-up companies so you can't have start-up companies without a viable patent system is it working well now or it could be improved this whole patent thing it works pretty well it could always be improved it changes every few years Congress is always passing new laws and all these different countries agree because you say they're fighting well they're they agree on what the law should be China mostly just ignores it they just cheat they cheat because there's negotiations between the United States and China right now and one of the big issues there is China cheats on patents and they don't pay the Americans billions of dollars for things they've just stolen and since China is winning anyway they should play fair if you're losing the game cheating isn't so bad but if you're winning the game it's sort of outrageous to cheat at the same time it wouldn't be a problem for them to just pay something they have so much money right they have plenty of money they could pay for the patents they and they could buy more American stuff for sure they'd love to they almost have to otherwise we won't build a pen back we got so much debt they can think they're rich but if they don't allow us to make enough money then we won't be able to pay back the loans and they'll lose anyway I'm sure they want to buy more American stuff they have nothing against it China has been starting when it was a weak country and it almost needed they felt they needed to cheat in order to catch up China is now so big there's no excuse for cheating anymore China should be following its own patent law and not cheating they have a long habit of cheating and they'll have to change that you go to China a lot? I do so you're giving them ideas for what they should do with all this stuff with the patent stuff I mean I guess yeah