Founding father of display technology shares thoughts of future, past Dr. Larry Weber is currently the 25th president of the Society for Information Display (SID) based in San Jose, California. He is one of the pioneers of plasma display technology. The president spoke at the International Display Manufacturing Conference (IMID) which was held from August 22 to 25 of this year in Daegu, Korea. Dr. Weber has an extensive history with display technology. He received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering. In 1987 he became a founder of Plasmaco, Inc. along with Stephen Globus and James Kehoe, and worked in that company for 9 years. In 1996 Plasmaco was acquired by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd, and he was named president and CEO. On May 15th, 2000, at the SID Symposium in San Francisco, California, he received the SID Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize for pioneering contributions to Plasma Display Panel technology and its commercialization. Q: I bet you already know your nickname, PDP father. What do you think about that A: Well, actually that's not 100% accurate because the PDP was invented in 1964 and I was still in high school then. I met the inventors. I went to the University of Illinois, and met the two professors that invented the plasma display, so I was their student. These inventors, one of them passed away years ago, and the other one is still a professor, Professor Pitcher, but he doesn't work in displays. He worked in displays only for a short time in the 60's, but I worked in displays from that time when I first met him in the 60's until now. So people look at me and they've seen me for many years and so they think I was the inventor. No I wasn't the inventor, I was a student of the inventors. But still, I've worked on it for so many years that people think I invented the plasma display. But now I'm the president of SID and I represent all the displays - plasma, liquid crystal, CRTs, projection, everything. Q: Please evaluate the Korean industry's power and competitiveness in the world market. A: Well, what's been amazing is how quickly the Korean display industry has grown. Its just happening much faster than anybody expected. Ten years ago there really wasn't a very strong Korean industry, but Japan was number one ten years ago. Now Japan, in liquid crystal displays, is number three. So Korea has done very well. Of course Taiwan is coming along also, but I think Korea has plasma displays, has liquid crystal displays, has OLED displays. Taiwan doesn't have any plasma displays. Taiwan only has the crystals, and they are interested in the OLEDs. So Korea has really done very well and is very competitive. But displays is a really tough business, and its hard to stay on top for a long time. China of course wants some action, and Taiwan is going to continue to work very hard, so its hard to stay. But Korea has done an excellent job. Its amazing to see how quickly its grown. Q: What in your opinion are Taiwan companies' strong points in displays A: Well one of the things that Taiwan does that Korea could do a little better on is the university system is very closely tied to the industry. The government I think of Taiwan has done that. And you go to these university parks where the university will be there and they'll build a display fab that the university can use and the industry can use. And so the university will sort of use it inside the university and then outside of the university will be the buildings for the industry. I don't think Korea has quite adopted that kind of model where they're using those universities as effectively as Taiwan. In Korea it works more like the American model where most of the universities are sort of separate from industry. The exceptions were places like MIT or Stanford where all of Silicon Valley grew around Stanford because it has sort of that similar model that Taiwan has. So there are some exceptions in the United States but for the most part we separate our universities from our industry, they don't cooperate so much together. That's really been a big strength for Taiwan. Have the university people participate and teach the industry people what they need to know and then they can work together. Q: What do you think of the Korean display industry, and can you give your advice to develop the Korean display industry A: Well I think you have to be doing more R&D. I think your university systems are actually pretty good. You've got a lot of young people that are enthused about displays, so I think you have to do more of that R&D and get more of that R&D transferred into industry. So that could be done a little bit better. You're certainly investing very heavily, that's good. Unlike the United States, in the United States nobody wants to invest in displays. So that's our weakness, we can't even play in the game because nobody wants to invest. So here you're investing heavily and its paying off. Q: How about AM OLED and AUO wanting to stop the development of AM OLED Is it risky A: Well yeah, AM OLED is still sort of a risky thing. And the reason its risky is because the liquid crystal is still there. The liquid crystal is really already a mature technology and so it can move very quickly. If AM OLED shows that there's a market for some kind of display liquid crystals can very quickly modify its characteristics and go after that market and give people a lower price. So any new technology has to be overwhelmingly better than any other technology in order to beat a well-established technology. And so the question is, how is AM OLED overwhelmingly better Is it 3 times better than a liquid crystal I don't know. If there was an application where it was something that a liquid crystal couldn't do, then it would be overwhelmingly better. But if its just a display on a mobile phone, its maybe not overwhelmingly better, its a little bit better. But the problem is AM OLED costs more, its always going to cost more. So if AM OLED was much cheaper, and it was much better then it would be much easier.