Cambridge Display Technology (Cambridge, England) gave the world's first public demonstration, of Light Emitting Polymers at the Flat Information Displays Conference in San Jose, California in December 1995.

The conference, an annual event organised by industry analysts Stanford Resources, is a meeting place for opinion formers and market leaders of the global electronic displays industry. It also features the desktop forum which provides an opportunity for companies to showcase new developments in the displays market. It was at this venue that CDT chose to give the world's first public demonstration of light emitting polymer (LEP) displays.

CDT showed an LEP backlight mounted to a conventional LCD and also a seven segment display demonstrator. These are important milestones for the company, as they represent the products which the company will launch into its first market, mobile communications. The company believes that the technology's features and benefits fit well with the requirements of its focus market, and that the increasing demands for information placed on portable products will provide a basis for developing the capabilities of the technology from backlights through to graphic displays, its long term focus.

Light Emitting Polymers were discovered in Cambridge University in 1989 and CDT was set up to exploit the invention. The company owns a very broad basic patent on the technology and has developed a lot of additional IPR, both within the University and from its own development team which was established in 1994. LEPs were recognised by the UK Government's recent Foresight Committee Report (IT&E report, OST, 1995) as being one of the likely display technologies of choice by the year 2005 - along with CRT and LCD, based on the view that LEPs have "huge potential for low cost manufacture".