industry news

The Spindt-tip FED Returns

Chiba, Japan – At one end of the large Futaba booth at CEATEC Japan – held here at the Makuhari Messe, October 3-7, 2006 – there was a display of field-emission display prototypes ranging up to 14.4 inches with 800x600 pixels. But one of them isn’t only a prototype. It will soon be a commercial product that is due to be rolled out in Q1 of 2006, said Yasuharu Arima, Deputy Manager, Marketing and Sales, for Futaba’s Electronic Components Division.

Although the 3-inch, vertical-format, 80x184-pixel display was bright at 600 nits and exhibited 512 colors with high contrast, it did not have the obvious crowd appeal of the large-screen TV displays being exhibited in the next hall, and only a few people were clustered around the display on the exhibition’s opened day. But the crowd grew moderately as the week wore on, presumably because Futaba’s achievement is genuinely newsworthy. Field-emission displays (FEDs) have not been available since June 2002 when PixTech, their only commercial source, was forced to go out of business. In addition, the Futaba FEDs are based on the Spindt-tip technology that PixTech used, not the carbon nanotube technology that has been soaking up most of the R&D dollars remaining to FEDs over the last few years.

Jean-Luc Grand-Clement, PixTech’s founder, commented by e-mail, ”It is interesting to see that the resilience of Futaba is finally paying off.”

Futaba – the leading maker of alphanumeric vacuum-fluorescent displays for automobiles, appliances, and similar applications – knows its customers well, and presumably knows it must satisfy these customers that the company has solved the lifetime problems that plagued companies such as Motorola and Candescent when they tried to ramp up FED production.

Yasuharu Arima, Deputy Group Manager, Futaba Corp., +81-43-296-5112, arima@ml.futaba.co.jp.

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