Eureka grant to aid OLED development

A Cambridge Display Technology product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team May 28, 2003

CDT has received a grant from the UK Department of Trade and Industry to develop a new, low power multimedia silicon application reference platform for next generation portable consumer products.

Cambridge Display Technology (CDT) has received a grant from the UK Department of Trade and Industry to develop a new, low power multimedia silicon application reference platform for the next generation of portable consumer products.

The effort is funded under the Eureka framework, a pan-European network for encouraging near to market, collaborative R and D projects, which lead to the development of advanced products, processes or services.

The grant is for a collaborative project called Pocket Multimedia between ST Microelectronics, Thompson Multimedia, Philips, Urmet, CMM/Armines and CDT.

The project partners will develop hardware and software building blocks suitable for a broad range of handheld appliances.

Emphasis will be placed on developing low power consumption solutions that incorporate state-of-art technologies capable of offering the best trade off in term of performance and design to cost for emerging products.

As part of a series of innovative technologies, LEP displays will play an integral part in this project by offering high performance images at low-power consumption, which will be ideal for nomadic applications.

"For this project, CDT will develop monochrome and full colour displays using inkjet printing based on CDT's proprietary LEP technology", said CDT's Director of Business Development, Dr Karl Heeks.

"This grant is significant because of the broad industry collaboration and because it enables the early integration and validation of LEP technology in a wide range of electronic consumer products".

The portable electronic product market is large with forecast sales of more than a quarter of billion units by 2005.

The OLED display market is expected to grow to over US $2 billion in revenue by 2008, with half of this revenue coming from portable electronic consumer products such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants, digital cameras and camcorders.

The multimedia silicon application reference platform with integrated LEP displays is expected to be applicable to all these different consumer products.