SED, die neue Flatpanel Technologie von Toshiba und Canon

Gerade machen brandneue Infos über eine vielversprechende Technologie für flache TVs die Runde.
Die Technologie wird SED (surface-conduction electron-emitter display) genannt und stammt aus einem mehrjährigen Jointventure zwischen Toshiba und Canon.

Toshiba kündigte jetzt in einer Pressekonferenz vor zwei Tagen an, dass erste Geräte bis 2006 auf den Markt kommen sollen. Die Markteinführung der SED TVs soll mit den geplanten Geräten zur HD DVD abgestimmt werden.

Auf EETimes in USA ist dazu folgender Artikel erschienen:

Venture cuts its own path to flat TV panels
By Yoshiko Hara , EE Times
September 17, 2004 (3:03 PM EDT)
URL: http://www.eet.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=47900163

Tokyo — A new flat-panel television technology from Canon and Toshiba is likely to face fierce competition from the makers of plasma and liquid-crystal displays.

While the new joint venture, SED Inc., claims CRT picture quality for its panel in a slimmer form factor, the company begins operations next month just as plasma display panel prices are falling and LCD sizes are gradually scaling up.

Nevertheless, officials at Canon Inc. and Toshiba Corp. express confidence in their $1.8 billion venture and expect to be producing their first 50-inch glass panels by next summer.

The partners took the wraps off their surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) panels last week. Despite the competition the technology faces in the large-flat-panel TV market against established LCD and PDP technologies, it can succeed in time, insisted Canon and Toshiba officials.

After a five-year research push, the joint venture will begin to develop, produce and market the SED panels next month. Canon and Toshiba, who are equal partners in the venture, plan to build a volume production fab that will begin operating by 2007.

Both companies expect the operation to turn out more than 3 million 40- to 50-inch panels annually by 2010. The market for flat-panel TVs in those sizes is expected to be under 30 million units annually by then, said Yoshiko Tamura, an analyst for DisplaySearch Inc. (Austin, Texas). Tamura added that plasma panel shipments, expected to total 18 million by 2010, would be the closest competitor to the SED technology.

Canon and Toshiba are clearly taking the long-term view that their technology will be viable when the 40- to 50-inch flat-panel TV market takes off.

Tadashi Okamura, president and CEO of Toshiba, said that the large-sized flat-TV market, with about 1.5 million units in the world this year, "is still immature."

"The market will grow four or five times larger around 2010," he predicted. "High-definition large displays will be really in big demand when the high-definition content become popular around 2006 and after."

His counterpart at Canon, president and CEO Fujio Mitarai, said the partners are convinced that once SED panels are in volume production their prices will fall low enough to keep pace with other flat-panel technologies.

But analysts remained skeptical that a technology with only one key supplier can achieve the cost reductions and production yields needed to drive sales in a price-sensitive consumer market.

"It's hard to find a case where a single source of supply and technology can drive the price down," said Paul Semenza, an analyst for iSuppli/Stanford Resources (Santa Clara, Calif.). "All the flat-panel technologies took decades of production to drive the cost down and make repeatable."

The street prices of high-definition plasma displays have already fallen. Earlier this summer, DisplaySearch noted a decline of 14 percent in four months on 42-inch panels and a 10 percent drop on 50-inch glass. The company expects that prices will decline further.

Others question how SED technology will compete with LCDs, whose suppliers continue to bring next-generation fabs online that can fabricate increasingly larger screen sizes.

"Some debate as to how far LCD makers can go," Semenza said, acknowledging that some industry observers see LCD makers as best-suited to building 30- to 40-inch screens. Still, he said, "there's always the capability for them to build 40- to 50-inch panels."

Toshiba acknowledges the LCD threat by calling the SED venture part of a two-pronged strategy to capture share in the flat-panel TV market. The company recently announced it would establish a joint LCD fab in January next year with Hitachi Ltd. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. The fab will produce LCD panels for TVs. The fab, which will be online by the second quarter of 2006, will focus on 26- to 32-inch LCD panels, with 37 inches its biggest display.

"Now we can clearly draw a strategy to promote LCD TVs of 32 inch and under and SED TVs for the larger-size sector," said Toshiba's Okamura.

Canon, which began to develop SED technology in 1986, sees it as a vital video output companion device to its own cameras and video equipment.

"Canon has strong products, such as digital still cameras and copiers, as input devices and printers as output devices for still images," said Mitarai. "But video becomes essential in the broadband era, with the display the centerpiece of office equipment and home audio/video equipment." The company plans to sell SED TVs alongside its digital still cameras and video cameras.

SED will begin pilot production next August at Canon's Hiratsuka plant. One processing line will produce 50-inch glass panels at a rate of 3,000 per month.

The volume fab, to be located on Toshiba's premises, will initially produce 15,000 units per month when it first comes online in 2007, ramping up to 75,000 units monthly by the end of that year.

Canon is contributing SED intellectual property to the venture. Toshiba is providing its production expertise and CRT technology, which bears a resemblance to SED.

The SED panel basically has a CRT-like structure but replaces the electron gun with electron emitters, said Shunichi Uzawa, newly named president of SED Inc. The electron emitter has a plane structure and an emitting area that consists of an ultrafine palladium oxide (PdO) particle film layer, electrode layer and glass substrate. There is a slit in the PdO film layer that is several nanometers wide.

Applying voltage on the electrodes in this tiny slit creates a tunneling phenomenon that emits electrons, which are accelerated to hit a phosphor-coated glass substrate on the opposite side. Unlike CRTs, Canon said, the SEDs do not need electronic-beam deflection, making it possible to create wall-mounted large-screen TV displays with a thickness measured in centimeters.

In the volume-production phase, Canon plans to introduce printing technology that the company fostered for bubble jet printers to form the surface-conduction electron cathode structure.

A prototype SED display provides color reproduction, viewing angle and video response equal to a CRT, the companies said, but it achieves a contrast in dim light of 86,00:1, said to be nearly three times higher than the best dim contrast of PDPs.

In addition, the SED display's emission efficiency of over 5 lumens/watt is much higher than the 1 to 2 lumens/W of PDPs. The prototype 36-inch panel requires about half the power needed for PDPs and LCDs when it displays movie content and one-third of PDPs and two-thirds of LCDs when showing news content, Uzawa said.

— Additional reporting by Spencer Chin

Viel Spass beim Lesen !

Kienberg

Hab gerade selbst nen Zeitungsartikel zur SED-Technologie gelesen. Da frage ich mich, wofür ich momentan noch für nen LCD/PLasma spar und mich schlau mach

Hört sich ma echt hammer an.
Hab auch n Forum gefunden, wo Bilder dabei sind, auf denen LCD, Plasma und SED verglichen werden:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=446156

Gruß,
Burton