Displays: Paul E. Gulick
Clear picture of displays' future

The northwestern corner of the United States has become an important center for display technology in the 1990s, and most of the Washington and Oregon action has grown from a single trunk: Tektronix Inc. So did Paul E. Gulick, president and chief executive officer of Clarity Visual Systems, who left Tek to take on an impressive list of new challenges at a sequence of spinoffs. The conquest of those challenges has been a driving force in multiple display technologies and display applications.

Gulick, who is 39, married and the father of a 12-year-old son, joined Tek in 1982 after graduating from college and set to work designing a high-resolution CRT monitor for a high-end workstation. "It may have been the first autoconvergence direct-view CRT system," he recalled, "but Tek was starting to make decisions related to buying Japanese monitors vs. designing internally, and I saw the writing on the wall."

Seeking other opportunities, Gulick, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, moved on in 1984 to a company that was spun off a Tektronix thin-film electroluminescent (TFEL) display project, Planar Systems (Beaverton, Ore).

As an engineering manager at Planar, Gulick ran a program that he said "ultimately culminated in putting an EL panel into a laptop computer for the first time." The DG1, from Data General, sported a 640 x 200-pixel EL display. "LCD technology wasn't there yet for high-res displays," Gulick said.

Although the DG1 portable did not turn out to be a hit, he said, "it was definitely a milestone in terms of U.S. FPD evolution."

Gulick was involved at Planar on EL projects that were vital to the successful evolution of the technology. "The big challenge as we tried to ramp up EL manufacturing was that we stumbled across a latent-image phenomenon," he recalled. "If you put the same image up on the panel for hours and hours on end, [the display] tended to remember it permanently. We needed to come up with some innovative electronic interfaces to eliminate that permanent storage effect, and we were successful."

The core of the problem, he pointed out, was ion migration. "Basically, you're permanently phase-changing the response of the phosphor so it turns on at a dif-ferent threshold voltage. What we came up with was a technique that essentially neutralized that by switching polarity."

In operation, the pixels of a thin-film EL display are alternately addressed by a drive pulse and then cleared by a reset pulse. "It was the asymmetric nature of those pulses that created the ion imbalance," Gulick said.

"The new drive technology changed the reset pulse in time and phase throughout the display [and eliminated the problem]. On one screen, it might be right at the beginning of the scanning cycle; and on another, we might do it at the end. We called it the rolling reset."

Coming up with the addressing scheme "was certainly a major challenge," said Gulick, "and, of course, we were pushing the envelope of form factor and were right on the leading edge of interconnect technology. We had to figure out how to connect drivers to glass with a high-res interconnect and in a very thin profile."

It wasn't long before Gulick heard the siren song of new FPD applications and the challenges of developing technology for them. In 1986, he set out with one of the founders of Planar, Steve Hix (also formerly of Tektronix), and launched what is perhaps the leading company in the electronic projector market: In Focus Systems (Wilsonville, Ore.).

Seeing the light
The genesis of In Focus lay in Planar's exploration of advanced packaging and interconnect techniques for high-resolution EL displays. "Planar was working with Kyocera at the same time, [and Kyocera] had chip-on-glass technology," Gulick recalled, "so we had some early Kyocera COG LCDs. They may have been the first LCD panels we'd seen that didn't have all the drivers mounted on a circuit board behind the panel. You could actually shine light through it," he said.

Then, one day, as Gulick tells it, "Steve and I were sitting around and shooting the breeze and I said: 'I wonder how bright a backlight we could put behind it.' Then Steve said, 'What about an overhead [transparency] projector? They're really bright.' And sure enough, we hooked up a prototype Japanese character generator to the panel, laid the panel on an overhead projector, and we could see the image on the wall."

Gulick then spent several months building a prototype LCD projection panel in his basement. "Steve said if I could figure out how to build one of these things, he could figure out how to sell it," Gulick said.

When the prototype was done, he and Hix presented it to Planar management, but Planar "didn't want to dilute their [EL] efforts," said Gulick, "so Steve and I ultimately got a local investor to put in a little seed capital and we spun out and started In Focus in 1986." The dynamic duo took a small booth at Comdex in November of that year, and by the next year the projection-panel business took off.

The initial projection panels were monochromatic. As competitors came into the business, In Focus and Gulick-his title was vice president of technology-saw a need to get to market quickly with color. "It was a real turning point for us and the industry when we hired Arley Connor away from Tektronix to be principal engineer" in 1987, Gulick said.

"Our customers were asking for color and the Japanese were working on TFT [thin-film transistor] LCDs and color filters, so we tried to find another way to do it. Arley came up with the stacked-color method that ultimately really kicked In Focus and the projection-technology market in the butt. We went from $12 million in sales in '89 to $36 million in 1990 and were able to take the company public, and it was because we had the only color game in town."

Connor's approach was to combine three monochrome panels of yellow, cyan and magenta in a subtractive color scheme; the competition used a single panel with filters and an additive red/green/blue scheme. "Stacked was quite a departure from the standard way of thinking about how to do color," said Gulick. "We had three-times-better resolution and about two-times-better [light] transmission. The only thing we couldn't do was full-motion video."

In 1994 Connor left In Focus to found a new company, Lightware, which makes ultraportable LCD projectors. Gulick's next step was to hire Terry Schaeffer, credited with inventing the STN (supertwisted nematic) LCD, and his colleague Ben Clifton from Tektronix's sagging LCD effort.

The new development team delivered a concept called active addressing (AA), which became Gulick's pet project. Schaeffer and Clifton departed from the conventional one-line-at-a-time addressing used by LCDs to develop multiline addressing algorithms that made video possible for passive LCDs. "We believed it had much broader implications than just projection technology," Gulick said. "It was a natural for me to [make the] transition and help lead that."

In Focus announced active addressing in early 1992 and by the fall announced Motif Inc., a spin-off joint venture with Motorola, to seed AA technology in the field with ASICs, licenses and LCDs. By April 1995 though, the startup had died because of lack of funding. That's when Gulick, Motif's chief executive and chief technical officer, moved on to found Clarity. Clifton "heads up my engineering" (Schaeffer is semiretired and consulting from Hawaii).

The breakup of Motif also meant the breakup of the Gulick-Hix team. Hix went on to found Sarif Inc., a polysilicon active-matrix LCD company, which made a brief foray into LCD projectors. Gulick aimed to make LCD projection "cubes," self-contained rear-projection display systems on the order of 40 to 50 inches diagonally, that function either as standalone devices or, racked and stacked, form bigger mosaic displays or video walls. These cubes target a virtually nonexistent market, "dynamic signage," that Gulick says will be really big one day.

"It had always struck me that there are other markets for large-screen digital images besides just the conference room [In Focus' major market]," said Gulick. "The idea of a large, bright image that is generated in solid-state form is very compelling for a large number of markets."

The technical challenges, he said, were "basically how to take advantage of the form factor to provide the sum of the features that a video wall or stackable or multiple-display system requires for very high-brightness environments like public venues." That includes fast-food restaurants, theater lobbies and department stores.

There were optical challenges "to fit it into a reasonable form factor," he said, "and image-quality issues in terms of getting the brightness uniformity, the color consistency and the focus perfect across the screen." But real-estate issues were very forgiving compared with front-screen projectors. "When you're talking about something that weighs, say, 80 pounds, if it costs an extra pound and a half to add a lot of features, who cares?"

The cube concept gave Clarity other degrees of freedom. "We have a fixed focal length," said Gulick. "Our projector is always the same distance from the screen, so we can count on that in our optics design to get much higher quality than you can get with a front-screen projector, which needs to focus at a variety of distances. There were a lot of opportunities to improve on the state of the art simply because we're the first ones putting digital display technology into a box and we've got a good solid year to two-year head start on anybody else setting out to try and do the same thing."

In 1998 Clarity expanded its video-cube lineup beyond LCDs to include the digital light-processing technology of Texas Instruments' Digital Micromirror Devices, and beyond rear projection to plasma display panels. In the short term, Clarity doesn't appear to be actively seeking other display technologies to add to its bag of tricks. The company is still essentially in startup mode, said Gulick, with its growth markets still ahead of it. But in the long run, he is pondering ways to slash costs and broaden the dynamic-signage market. One technology that has piqued his interest is liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCOS) displays.

"Their promise is low-cost but their tendency is high-resolution," Gulick said. "If my customer is putting up a picture of a hamburger, VGA looks pretty good, SVGA is too many pixels already and forget about XGA. A couple years down the road, after [LCOS] has matured a little bit, I think we'll want to take our own spin at that."

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