Business: Optical technology supplier
Number of Employees: 8

Shao-Tang Sun is the president of a promising new company now, with investment dollars starting to pour in, but he still remembers very clearly that week in 1993 when his research team was about to disband, lacking the resources to capitalize on an intriguing optical technology it had patented several years before.

Their only hope was funding from the NIST Advanced Technology Program, for which they had applied and now eagerly waited. However, a key member of the team had an attractive job offer, which he had delayed accepting several times. Now he had a deadline to accept or reject the offer by Friday of that week.

"It really sounded like a novel or a movie," Sun remembers. "He really agonized over it--he had to make a decision. We couldn't wait for ATP any longer. Then it finally happened on that Wednesday: Someone sent a fax from our congressional office, and my secretary called me at home."

The ATP award announced in that fax kept the research team together and, as a result, supported basic research and proof-of-concept work on a fundamental technology that could solve a difficult problem in the manufacture of liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), thereby improving yields and reducing costs. The team recently formed a new company, Elsicon, Inc., to commercialize the optical technology that was designed and demonstrated with ATP funds at two other companies, Hercules and Alliant Techsystems.

The industry has high hopes for the new technology, called OptoAlign™. In June 1997, Elsicon received a $1.65 million contract from the U.S. Display Consortium (USDC), a four-year-old public-private partnership based in San Jose, Calif., that aims to establish a U.S. infrastructure to support high-definition display manufacturing. The display market currently is dominated by Japan. The USDC, which has 130 corporate members and also receives support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Department of Defense, will pay half the $3.3 million costs of developing a scaled-up manufacturing process, with Elsicon funding the other half.

The USDC chose to fund Elsicon's proposal because "it built upon a strong foundation of intellectual property in patents and know-how that were developed under a prior grant in the NIST ATP program," according to M. Robert Pinnel, USDC's chief technical officer. LCDs are used widely in applications such as laptop computers, calculators, video games, instruments, and emerging high-definition television systems. Until now LCDs have been manufactured using a contact process for aligning the liquid crystals into the requisite uniform pattern. The process, called mechanical buffing or rubbing, involves running a fibrous velvet cloth against a polymeric material adjacent to the liquid crystal media. The buffed polymer surface aligns the liquid crystals, but the process is neither well understood nor very clean, resulting in high manufacturing costs.

Sun says manufacturers will not tell him their actual yields using mechanical rubbing. What's more, there is no in-line test for determining if rubbing is successful, he says. The only way to evaluate now is to fabricate the LCD glass panel, then do the test. Any yield loss due to rubbing results in the loss of expensive glass panels. A typical 10-inch glass panel costs about $200 to manufacture.

Elsicon's solution to this problem evolved over a decade. The team of physicists, optical scientists, engineers, chemists, and materials scientists began working together at Hercules, which in the late 1980s sought to build its aerospace business by entering the optoelectronics field and purchasing a display manufacturer. The research team supported that venture and, in 1990, patented a technique for using polarized light to control molecular orientation. Once the ATP funding came through, the concept was tailored for application to LCD manufacturing. Then, in 1995, Hercules divested its aerospace business to Alliant Techsystems, which formed a partnership with Sun's team and helped incubate the emerging technology. In April 1997, Elsicon licensed all the optical technology developed under the other two companies.

The optical technology, called OptoAlign™, is a non-contact method that sounds simple in concept. A polymer is placed next to the liquid crystal media. Polarized ultraviolet light is shined on the polymer and then turned off, which changes the material in such a way that the liquid crystals are aligned in the uniform manner required for LCDs. But significant innovations were required to make the process work. First, a new polymeric material was engineered and fabricated. (Polymers are long chain-like molecules noted for unique combinations of properties; plastic is an example.) Second, the team developed a new way of controlling light. Patents are pending on both technologies. The team also is seeking a patent on a technique adapting the same approach to optical media for information storage. Sun envisions additional applications in the manufacture of passive optical components and switches.

Elsicon is working with several major LCD manufacturers to incorporate the optical technology into their factory processes and has signed an agreement with a major materials company that will serve as Elsicon's materials distributor in Japan. Although the commercial impact of the new technology is not yet known, Sun expects that manufacturing yields and display performance (in terms of enhanced viewing angle) will be improved and costs will be reduced. "It's hard to quantify at this stage but we think it will be substantial because the interest is substantial," he says, adding that "the market is really pulling us." He expects to have reliable data in less than two years.

Under the USDC contract, Elsicon will set up a facility to develop and evaluate suitable materials and define process conditions and establish a partnership with an equipment manufacturer to design and produce production tools.

Sun credits the ATP with making the U.S. display industry a little bit richer and helping the country retain some valuable intellectual property in a market dominated by Japan. "For us it was not just the money--it was another validation that our belief [in the promise of the optical technology] is correct," Sun says.

September 1997