Prime View International Had Option to Buy E-Ink

Prime View, which assembles the e-book displays in sizes of 5 to 9.7 inches, lent E-Ink $20 million last year to help it repay a loan being called by a venture capital firm that was among the company’s early investors, sources said. E-Ink considered seeking a funding round to cover the loan but instead chose the agreement with Prime View. The lender got an option to buy E-Ink for about $200 million and completed much of its due diligence last year, sources said. Prime View acted in the beliefs that E-Ink’s value would continue to rise as electronic book sales increased and that the company had received several purchase offers in recent years.

“They had planned to pay off the loan with its own cash by the end of this year,” but the venture capital firm wanted to be repaid sooner, an analyst said. E-Ink’s revenue is expected to hit $200 million this year as more than 15 brands of e-books hit the market, analysts said. An E-Ink spokesman declined to comment.

E-Ink has raised $150 million since its founding, having completed a fifth funding round in September 2007. It has a long list of investors including Hearst Corp., Intel Capital, Motorola, Philips Venture Capital Fund and Toppan. Toppan, which supplies color filers for the electrophoretic displays, was among E-Ink’s early investors. Toppan provided $5 million in 2001 in exchange for a brief exclusive on color filters. It invested an additional $25 million in E-Ink in 2002. E-Ink also has a supply alliance with Dialog Semiconductor, which provides display drivers.

Prime View entered the picture in 2005 with the acquisition of Philips’ electrophoretic display business that had been working with E-Ink. Prime View has an almost 400,000-square-foot plant in Taiwan, including a clean room of more than 118,000 square feet. Electrophoretic displays are said to account for 50 percent of Prime View’s revenue, although the company also makes mono bi-stable products for Qualcomm MEMS Technology. Among other things, Philips and E- Ink developed a 5-inch rollable display with 240x320 resolution (CED May 27/05 p1) that later became the basis for product from PolymerVision. PolymerVision has an agreement to build the rollable display into a Telecom Italia cellphone.

From the launch of Amazon’s Kindle in late 2007, the market for e-books with E-Ink’s technology has grown quickly. At least 20 models are expected to be available by year-end. More than a million were sold last year, analysts said. Besides Amazon and Sony products, the offerings include Hanvon’s HandyBook ($295), which has a 5.5-inch display with 800x600 resolution and is being sold in China. There are 6,000 books available, some free. The HandyBook features Ingenic Semiconductor’s 336 MHz processor, along with an SD memory card slot, 512 MB of flash and 64 MB of RAM. FoxIt Software also is expected to start shipping the eSlick Reader in July with a 6-inch screen and 128 of RAM. ESlick doubles as a digital audio player and is packaged with earphones, 2 GB SD card and FoxIt PDF Creator software. FoxIt has taken pre-orders and in January had short-term promotion pricing eSlick at $249 for those who signed up. Brother is expected this year to ship a document viewer in Japan with the 9.7- inch display used in Amazon’s Kindle DX. At SID, E-Ink demonstrated a 5-inch color display with 800x600 resolution. It’s expected to introduce color models in 2010.

SID Notebook…

MicroEmissive Displays, which shut down this year, is in talks with venture capital investors about reviving the company, sources said. It would take about $5 million to restart the company and as much as $12 million if it wants to increase the resolution of its OLED microdisplay to 640x480, sources said. MicroEmissive CEO Bill Miller is said to be involved in the discussions. MicroEmissive was trying to raise $40 million last year to develop a 0.4-inch OLED and faced running out of cash by December unless investors were found. Sumitomo got a 3 percent stake in MicroEmissive by buying Cambridge Display Technology in 2007. MicroEmissive has a licensing agreement with CDT for polymer-based OLEDs. MicroEmissive shipped 100,000 units of its 0.24-inch OLED microdisplay with 320x240 resolution since starting production at its Dresden, Germany, facility in fall 2007. But development of a market for head-mounted displays was slower than expected, company officials have said. The Dresden plant, can produce 10 million units a year running three shifts, but is being kept open with three or four employees paid for by the Saxony state government, sources said. The 0.24-inch microdisplay, with a 250:1 contrast ratio and 125 candelas, came in Vuzix iWear AV310 video glasses ($249) sold by Brookstone, Hammacher Schlemmer and MicroCenter. Vuzix has since apparently switched suppliers to Kopin, which was demonstrating iWear at its booth at SID.

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NEC Electronics demonstrated a 13.8-inch electrophoretic display with 1,024x768, 16-step grayscale, 43 percent reflectivity and 10:1 contrast ratio. The prototype was built on a third-generation LCD line at an NEC factory in Japan using an amorphous silicon backplane, company officials said. Meanwhile, 3M is expected to deliver prism film for autostereoscopic 3D displays later this year, company officials said. It demonstrated the film on a three-inch LCD that operated at 120 Hz, delivering 60 Hz to each eye to create a 3-D image, 3M officials said. The three-inch panel had 432x240 resolution and 200 nits brightness, a 3M spokesman said.

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EMagin’s new 0.77-inch OLED microdisplay with 1,280x1,024 resolution and 1,000:1 contrast ratio is priced at about $2,500, with a circuit board to drive the unit costing an additional $4,900, a company official said. The display is made in low volume, but production is expected to increase this summer (CED June 3 p4) at eMagin’s plant in East Fishkill, N.Y. Among those using the 0.77-inch display for military applications is Minerva Engineering, which uses the OLED in its Mark VII emulated device for virtual reality training applications, a company spokesman said. Minerva received initial samples of the 0.77-inch in September and began putting it into products in December, the spokesman said. The customer’s virtual reality systems sells for about $30,000, he said. Minerva had previously used Kopin displays, the spokesman said.

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Corning expects to have its silicon on glass technology ready for full production in about two years, said George Wildeman, the company’s business director for science and technology. Corning demonstrated its SiOG materials on a second-generation substrate at SID and expects to scale to 4G by late this year, he said. Corning transfers a thin film of SiOG from a 12-inch silicon wafer to a substrate of display glass and bonds it to the substrate. Panelmakers can use the SiOG substrate to make the thin-film-transistor backplane for an active-matrix display. The size of the single crystal film is limited by the wafer it comes from, so a substrate must be coated in sections. But the technology could be scaled to 8G and the sections could be eliminated to allow SiOG to be used for large-size TV panels, company officials said. SiOG might be used as a backplane for AMOLEDs, Corning officials said. Most AMOLEDs are currently produced using a low-temperature polysilicon process limited to half of 4G substrate, creating uniformity and cost problems, Corning officials said. SiOG would allow for greater production yields of OLED switches and better performance than LTPS for larger sizes. The overall cost of a display could be lower, since SiOG could be used for integrating circuitry on the substrate, Corning officials said. Panel makers are testing SiOG and prototypes are possible by year-end, Product Line Manager Eric Mozdy said. Corning unveiled SiOG as a development project in 2007. Meanwhile, Corning shelved plans for its Vita sealing technology for OLEDs after completing development work, said Peter Bocko, chief technology officer for East Asia. The project was hampered by the OLED market’s slow development, company officials said.

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Qualcomm MEMS Technologies showed a 1.4-inch color bi- stable display likely to be among the first displays produced by new supplier Foxlink, company officials said. The 1.4- inch display featured 176x144 resolution, 6:1 contrast ratio, 27 percent reflectivity, 0.15mm pixel pitch and consumes less than one milliwatt of power, company officials said. The 1.4-inch is being sold as part of module for digital audio players and cellphones containing a driver/controller IC and diffuser/anti-reflective film.

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Stantum opened its first U.S. office, in Berkeley, Calif., largely funded by a $13 million financing round recently completed, Chief Strategy Officer Guillaume Largillier told us. The U.S. office of the company from Bordeaux, France, is headed by Francois Jeanneau, who started at Stantum last week, he said. The company will open an office in Singapore in July, Largillier said. Among the new investors is CDC, one of France’s largest venture capital firms, which joins XAnge Private Equity. XAnge led the last financing round in 2007, Largillier said. The new funding comes as Stantum expects to have CE OEM partners shipping mobile products with its multitouch technology by year-end, said Largillier, who declined to elaborate. The key to Stantum’s technology is a controlling method combined with the ability to detect and track multiple touch contacts with a display. Conventional touch controllers can’t detect more than one contact at a time. The technology is designed for five-inch to 20-inch panels and Stantum has manufacturing agreements with Wintek, Microtec and Nissha. It also has developed a version of its technology that’s combined with Vision Objects hand writing recognition software. The development was largely spurred by the companies’ shared investors, Largillier said.