Smoke, mirrors, and manufacturable displays

Abstract

Most development efforts toward the display technology focus on the initial demonstration, with little consideration of the demo's manufacturability. Efforts to make the product commercially available generally hit tremendous obstacles and die out within a few years. Unfortunately, researchers who build and successfully demonstrate prototypes usually are not aware of the difficulties that arise in bringing them to market. In many cases, these displays remain prototypes and will never make it to become a product. The hard part of a manufacturable solution is the cost: bandwidth, video encoding, circuit design and yield, display uniformity, reliability, and image quality all take their toll. When developing the ultimate display, an organization should focus on the manufacturing pipeline, leveraging its existing capacity to get from demo to product more quickly.