Cambridge Display Technology today announces plans to take its world-beating display technology out of the labs and into pilot production, and is launching a campaign to raise £4 million in a first-stage venture capital financing.

24th November 1995 - The three-year-old company, which holds the fundamental patents on light-emitting polymers (LEPs) that could revolutionise the multi-billion dollar global display industry, expects to ship its first products in 1997. At that stage, it plans an initial public offering.

"We believe that the invention of LEP is as important for the future direction of the displays industry as the discovery of LCD, which means thinking big from the outset and setting our sights on targets that match the potential", said David Mann, CDT chairman.

The potential for light-emitting polymers (LEPs) is a substantial proportion of the global electronic displays market estimated by analysts Stanford Resources, Inc. at $22.5 billion in 1994, and forecast by the Electronics Industry Association of Japan to go to $45 billion in the year 2000.

"The attractiveness of LEP displays", explains Professor Richard Friend, FRS, "is that they combine high performance, with low cost and can be fabricated on flexible sheets of plastic using well established and inexpensive manufacturing processes. Very large area, wafer thin displays of all kinds and shapes can be envisaged".

Professor Friend, who is the Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge University, is also a director of Cambridge Display Technology.

"The ultimate prize", he said, "is the replacement of CRT for computer displays and even television, but that is some way off and would only happen when the new technology provides the same performance as the CRT at a significantly smaller cost premium than achieved by existing flat panel technologies such as Active Matrix LCD."

In the meantime, there are some big markets already within reach and Cambridge Display Technology has based its initial marketing strategy on tackling these.

Markets
Some of the markets targeted by the company are characterised as "low information content" displays. A first target, for example, is low intensity backlights in products such as mobile phones, where LEP will be substituted for existing technologies because of its inherent simplicity and cost. Later targets are composite displays with complicated light patterns, where LEPs could replace perhaps 20 components with just one.

In "high information content" displays, ranging from those for advanced PDAs to computer and video applications, Cambridge Display Technology plans first to exploit newer markets where technologies are not yet entrenched. The company aims to establish leadership in these markets by leveraging the low cost base with the ease of patterning and addressing. An example could be headsets for virtual reality entertainment.

Development
For first products, CDT will employ glass rather than plastic as the base on which devices are built ("substrates") in some of its early low-information-content products. The company has no doubt, however, that the eventual market will be dominated by plastic substrates.

CDT has taken its technology to demonstrator stage. There is work to be done still on encapsulation and in extending the lifetime of the devices from the current (Nov 1995) 1500 hours as well as in developing a full palette of colours from the basic RGB (red, green, blue) demonstrators and adding to the brightness of the light emissions. There are currently no reasons, the company says, why the range of polymers should not be extended and developed to meet these requirements.

Early investors
The attraction of the technology and the size of the opportunity open to Cambridge Display Technology can be judged to some extent by the interest being shown by an impressive roster of early investors. These range from the rock group Genesis together with its manager, to computer industry luminaries such as the Sculley Brothers, Hermann Hauser, a founding director of Acorn Computer, now an Olivetti company; Steve Kahng, president of Power Computing Corporation.

It is also evident in the fact that Cambridge University has, for the first time, invested its own funds to secure shares in a company spawned from research at the university.

Funding to date for the company - some £3 million - has come from this small group of early investors and six Cambridge colleges, as well as from seed capital company Cambridge Research and Innovation Limited. The research has also benefited from financial support from the Science and Engineering Research Council and from the UK government sponsored LINK and SPUR programmes.

The discovery that conjugated polymers could be used to produce light emissions was made by teams led by Professor Richard Friend, in 1989, working in collaboration with chemists at the university, led by Dr. Andrew Holmes, Director of the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis.

The technology is covered by fundamental patents on the use of conjugated polymers in electroluminescent devices, some of which have now been granted. A range of other patents - some 20 in all (Nov. 1995) - have been filed and a further 17 are in various stages of the grant process.