Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The company, which was formed with seed funding from Ipswich-based New Venture Partners, used the SID expo in California as the platform to unveil a revolutionary new wristwatch display and a large area signange product.

And the company says it is hopeful of announcing the commercial launch of the watch technology in the near future.

Liquavista’s electro-wetting displays are reflective rather than transmissive and so offer the potential for clear viewing in all lighting conditions, while consuming a tenth of the power of similar sized LCD screens.

Crucially, the technology can be mass produced using existing LCD manufacturing processes, another advantage the company is keen to press home.

“We are showing our first generation watch module, driven with commercial silicon and powered by regular watch batteries,” said Anthony Slack, VP business development at Liquavista. “This demonstrates fantastic progress with our technology on a number of fronts in the 12 months since we were last at SID.

“We want to extend that offer to take advantage of the unbeatable ‘read at a distance’ which you get with our displays because of their deep colour intensity and excellent contrast in all lighting conditions.

“We also have customer interest from navigation, automotive and signage OEMs to name a few,” Slack said.

The company received investment of £3.4m at the time of spin-out and closed its Series A financing of £8.1m in December last year. The round was led by Amadeus and GMIV, with New Venture Partners participating. It established its Cambridge engineering base in September 2006, with plans to grow its workforce to around 15 in the medium term.

Mark Gostick CEO said: “The current holy grail of the watch industry is a good black and white display, with fast switching speeds to allow stop-watch functions.

“We have now included a wide range of deep colours which also bring a fashion element back to digital watch applications.

“To top it off, our engineers have developed drive schemes which have reduced power consumption by an order of magnitude which you need for an “always on” application like a watch.

“We are now in discussion with our development partner about further productisation and the commercial launch of this technology into the watch market.

“Having this early-to-market focus has enabled us to develop the technology rapidly and also bring our manufacturing processes forward to the point where we can commit to having a G2 line in mass production in the near future, based on an existing LCD facility.

“The Aquarius platform is also very exciting, not only because of its fantastic readability at all angles in all lights but because it clearly demonstrates the scalability of our technology and manufacturing processes.

“The display has a close to 6 inch diagonal size which makes a fantastic impression and can clearly be seen as pointing the way for future developments with our technology in Active Matrix based applications,” Gostick said.

Meanwhile, fellow display pioneer CDT has announced that in collaboration with Thorn Lighting and the University of Durham, it has been awarded a £1.6m grant by the DTI’s Technology Programme.

The grant will part fund a three-year project to develop solution processable organic materials and device architectures suitable for large area white lighting applications. The total project cost is £3.3million.

Under terms of the grant, CDT through its Sumation joint venture will provide materials, device architecture and testing, modelling, and technical input.

The project is aimed at developing materials and devices for solid-state, high efficiency lighting applications based on CDT’s patented P-OLED technology.

Light emitting polymer materials can be solution processed and offers the potential of low cost manufacturing for large lighting panels.

Successful completion of the project will offer novel lighting products with environmental benefits, CDT said.

CDT is spearheading the development of light emitting polymers and their use in a wide range of electronic display products used for information management, communications and entertainment.