NSREC Technology of Signage: Electronic Paper, LED Illumination and Teleportation: Fact or Fiction in 2010 and Beyond. Outline.

NSREC 2010 Technology of Signage: Electronic Paper, LED Illumination and Teleportation: Fact or Fiction in 2010 and Beyond Jason Heikenfeld Associate Professor University of Cincinnati www.ece.uc.edu/devices 1 Outline What I would like to accomplish INTERACTIVE SESSION, ASK QUESTIONS AS WE GO!!!! My day job (some of it not related to signage ) Trends in illumination of signage Why digital signage? Short term the emissives / transmissives. Longer term the reflectives (e-paper). Will go into detail! Ultimately transflectives / transparent. Could physical displays become irrelevant? Summary and Outlook GOAL: Give you a glimpse of what is coming down the pike. Awareness of what technological changes to prepare for, and what hype to ignore! 2

My Lab: Novel Devices Laboratory We like to start at this level Past projects were solid and gaseous state Electroluminescent Displays 2003 Light Wave Coupling Display scaled to 1.5x2.0m, 2005 Color Plasma-Spheres for IST Inc., R&D Mag Top 100 Award, 2005 our end goal Joined UC in 2005 - Novel Device Lab now an academic leader in applied electrowetting is always commercially 2005 2006 viable prototypes 2007 2009 2010 2010 2010 3 Who Funds Us CAREER 2007 (EPDT) AFOSR 2007 Young Investigator NSF CBET & IHCS AFRL Sensors Directorate Army Res. Lab AFRL Materials Directorate Army CERDEC 4

Light Wave Coupling One of our old projects 5 Light Wave Coupling Use for Signage (created by a commercial partner) 6

Light Wave Coupling Use for Toys! 7 Switch Gears When You Think UC, You Might Think.. Think Micro/Electrofluidics! Chong Ahn Andrew Steckl Bill Heineman Ian Papautsky Jason Heikenfeld And many others 8

All My Work Now is In Electrowetting (Will be a quiz!) oil Macroview lets ramp to ~10V (0.5 J/cm 2 ) H 2 O dielectric Microview Electrowetting equation: 2 V cos V = cos Y + 2 d WO WF = OF WO cos Y WF = OF WO cos V + V 2 2d (mn / m) 9 My Day Job: Making Switchable Liquid Prisms Make large arrays of these prisms for 3D holographic TV. Smith and Heikenfeld et al. - Opt. Express, July, 2006. 10

My Day Job: Making Switchable Retroreflectors What is a retroreflector? 3V (ON) 0V (OFF) Flexible! Kilaru & Heikenfeld Optics Express, 2010 11 My Day Job: Making the Next Generation of e-paper No technology to date has be able to mimic biological chromatophores that involve pigments and change in pigment area. zebrafish melanophore - chemically driven cephalopod chromatophore - muscle driven Electrofluidic Chromatophores! Our 1 st demo in spring of 2007! 12

Outline What I would like to accomplish My day job Trends in illumination of signage Why digital signage? Short term the emissives / transmissives. Longer term the reflectives (e-paper). Ultimately transflectives / transparent. Could physical displays become irrelevant? Summary and Outlook 13 LED Illumination Light Boxes are dominated by fluorescent lights, will this change to LEDs? - Will it changed based on bulb size? No, most laptops still use fluorescent backlights! - Based on cost? Yes! Total cost of ownership includes energy consumption and lifetime 14

LED Illumination Without a doubt, LED will dominate over fluorescent and most other lighting technologies. It is only a matter of time! Cost is improving (total package, it s not just the LED). Projected LED Luminaire Cost Track. Source: DOE Manufacturing Workshop consensus 15 LED Illumination INCD CCFL LED-02 LED-07 LED-12 LED-20 lm/w 16 85 25 75 150 200 khr 1 10 20 >20 >100 >100 $/klm 0.4 1.5 200 20 <5 <2 Source: DOE Solid State Lighting Roadmap 16

What is the Value? According to Wiki (popular opinion), the most common applications of digital signage: Red highlight those of particular importance for on premises signage : 1. Public information news, weather and local (location specific) information, such as fire exits and traveler information 2. Internal information - corporate messages, health & safety, news, etc. 3. Advertising either related to the location the signage is in or just using the audience reach of the screens for general advertising 4. Brand building in-store digital signage to promote the brand and build a brand identity 5. Influencing customer behavior directing customers to different areas, increasing the dwell time on the store premises. 6. Enhancing customer experience applications include the reduction of perceived wait time in restaurant waiting areas, bank queues, etc., as well as recipe demonstrations in food stores 7. Enhancing the environment with interactive screens (in the floor for example[5]) or with dynamic wayfinding 19 Digital Signage Current status: Getting better all the time (electrical and computer engineers) NOT SO GOOD Why not so good? Upfront cost, performance, regulations, TCO. 20

Outline What I would like to accomplish My day job Trends in illumination of signage Why digital signage? Short term the emissives / transmissives. Longer term the reflectives (e-paper). Ultimately transflectives / transparent. Could physical displays become irrelevant? Summary and Outlook 21 LED Billboards Louis M. Brill: 1.) The cost of acquiring digital billboards continues to descend 2.) As media planners develop their clients marketing campaigns, so will they see digital billboards as an important part of their advertising buy into regional and national markets, reinforcing outdoor advertising companies strategies of building and expanding their already existing digital billboard networks. Remaining issue is upfront and total cost of ownership. 22

What About LCD / Plasma / OLED? Challenge #1 hard to view in sunlight (typical LCD wastes >94% of the backlight!). If it uses an LED backlight, then it is ~15-20X less efficient than LED billboard! Challenge #2 COST! Cost coming down through scaling? Still tough to compete w/ LED. LCD will remain relegated to mainly TV sized signage such as bus stops where LED cannot complete in image resolution. 23 Outline What I would like to accomplish My day job Trends in illumination of signage Why digital signage? Short term the emissives / transmissives. Longer term the reflectives (e-paper). Detailed! Ultimately transflectives / transparent. Could physical displays become irrelevant? Summary and Outlook 24

Electronic Paper Uses Reflected Light!!! Cool! So what is missing? Audience participation please Lets review about 1/3 rd of e- Paper technologies in detail 25 Electrophoretic Not good enough for most signage because: Even long-term roadmaps struggle to push past 20% color reflectance (paper is 80%) and the color saturation is really poor (<25 of print paper). 26

QualComm MEMS QualComm has invested >$1B in R&D, and still not good enough for most signage because: Cool technology, but (1) cost is way to high for signage and (2) at best is only ~30% as reflective as white paper. And (3) view angle is not paper-like. Similar to butterfly wings or rainbow colors for a thin oil film on water 27 Electrochromic Not good enough for most signage because: Research results are really good, but it has been around for 40 years! Products only now being introduced for smart cards. 28

Cholesteric Not good enough for most signage? Maybe so-so Is not too bad, is about ~40% as good as regular print on paper 29 Cholesteric Full Color Cholesteric is COMING (slowly): 30

Cholesteric Full Color Cholesteric is COMING (slowly): Remember, at night the sign is 10-1000X less bright so power consumption at night is a non-issue. Daylight power savings is the advantage! 31 So Where Are We? We recently compiled all the data In monochrome mode (single color): - only a few can hit SNAP (newsprint) - no-one can hit SWOP yet (magazine quality). 32

So Where Are We? We recently compiled all the data In full color mode: - some maybe can hit SNAP (newsprint) - no-one can hit SWOP (magazine), yet Pursuit of SWOP could accelerate with new unforeseen breakthroughs So is there a signage market for e-paper? 33 Market Growth for e-paper (not LED, not LCD) 40 million units per year! Not bad! Reflective e-paper has its advantages (power, much better resolution than LED, viewing at any angle, etc..) 34

Market Growth However, number of units is not the only story (1 ESL costs a bit less than billboard). Next slide. 35 Market Growth Small today, but e-paper is poised to replace LED/LCD in the long term as: (1) the technology gets closer to SWOP; (2) energy consumption regulation forces adoption of e- Paper. 36

The Ultimate Sign Some may even be transparent 39 The Ultimate Sign Some may even be transparent Samsung transparent LCD (requires a SUPERBRITE backlight!) 40

The Future of Signage (the wild view) So what happens if MOST physical signs become irrelevant? May always need physical signs (what if the power goes out) But this could be very disruptive 43 Conclusions LEDs are inevitable for illumination. Soon you will use them for every reason (performance, total cost of ownership, and the govt. may force you!) Outdoor digital signage will mainly remain LED, and some LCD will appear too e-paper is coming in a big way! $10 s of billion market. But small in outdoor signs ($0.1 s of billion for now). Long term, transflective (zero power during day, illuminated at night) may be the future. Transparent and other novel eye-catching are coming available, if you are willing to pay a premium. The whole signage industry could be disrupted if eye-mounted or glasses mounted displays take hold. So lets finish with some context on disruption 44

Is Signage Immune to Strategic Inflection Points? Grove: Sooner or later, something fundamental in your business world will change. I'm often credited with the motto, "Only the paranoid survive." I have no idea when I first said this, but the fact remains that, when it comes to business, I believe in the value of paranoia. Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left. I believe that the prime responsibility of a manager is to guard constantly against other people's attacks and to inculcate this guardian attitude in the people under his or her management. The things I tend to be paranoid about vary. I worry about products getting screwed up, and I worry about products getting introduced prematurely. I worry about factories not performing well, and I worry about having too many factories. I worry about hiring the right people, and I worry about morale slacking off. 45 But these worries pale in comparison to how I feel about what I call strategic inflection points. I'll describe what a strategic inflection point is a bit later in this book. For now, let me just say that a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end. Strategic inflection points can be caused by technological change but they are more than technological change. They can be caused by competitors but they are more than just competition. They are full-scale changes in the way business is conducted, so that simply adopting new technology or fighting the competition as you used to may be insufficient. They build up force so insidiously that you may have a hard time even putting a finger on what has changed, yet you know that something has. Let's not mince words: A strategic inflection point can be deadly when unattended to. Companies that begin a decline as a result of its changes rarely recover their previous greatness. But strategic inflection points do not always lead to disaster. When the way business is being conducted changes, it creates opportunities for players who are adept at operating in the new way. This can apply to newcomers or to incumbents, for whom a strategic inflection point may mean an opportunity for a new period of growth. 46

Is Signage Immune to Strategic Inflection Points? You can be the subject of a strategic inflection point but you can also be the cause of one. Intel, where I work, has been both. In the mid-eighties, the Japanese memory producers brought upon us an inflection point so overwhelming that it forced us out of memory chips and into the relatively new field of microprocessors. The microprocessor business that we have dedicated ourselves to has since gone on to cause the mother of all inflection points for other companies, bringing very difficult times to the classical mainframe computer industry. Having both been affected by strategic inflection points and having caused them, I can safely say that the former is tougher. Another great example mentioned by Andy Grove in 1996! The possibility that all entertainment content can be created, stored, transmitted and displayed in digital form may change the entire media industry. In short, strategic inflection points are about fundamental change in any business, technological or not. Predicting the future is easy in the movies So plastics and lighting did revolutionize signage So what single BIG future prediction can we say about signage today? 47 Is Signage Immune to Strategic Inflection Points? The Signage Industry is NOT immune to strategic inflection points. Digital signage technology may not have all the parts needed yet, and at the cost, but that is changing rapidly! The next biggest thing in signs that will CHANGE THE WAY you do business is not a new slogan or a new way of designing signs. These are critical to the present health of the industry, but will not fundamentally alter it. In terms of FUTURE strategy, the signage industry should work closely with teams of engineers, computing scientists, marketing experts, designers, etc., to better understand the coming impact of digital signage. It has been an honor to speak with you. THANK YOU! 48