Suehiro Nakamura, senior executive vice president at Sony, pointed to great potential for GLV "in applications such as digital cinema and home theater," but indicated that the company will initially concentrate on front projectors for business applications and, later, on rear-projection monitors for the consumer market.

"We believe the GLV technology has the potential to become one of the key components for future large-scale projection displays that offer unprecedented image quality," Nakamura said.

Sony and SLM (Sunnyvale, Calif.) declined to put a price tag on the agreement.

Dave Corbin, Silicon Light Machines' president and chief executive officer, called Sony "the world's best authority on display quality" and "the best possible partner to advance all of our hard work to the next level. Meanwhile, we can apply the unique optical-micromachining talents of our engineering team toward other killer applications." One of them, he said, is optical communications.

"This is really fantastic news for both sides," said analyst David Mentley, vice president at Stanford Resources (San Jose, Calif.). "The biggest question has been the availability of laser light sources for the GLV to manipulate, and Sony clearly has great expertise in solid-state lasers from its work with CDs and DVDs. It's a great match in terms of technical and business direction, and it should yield some credible display products in the next few years."

Originally developed at Stanford University and first publicly demonstrated in 1998, the GLV devices are reflective devices built on silicon chips, in the manner of another MEMS technology — Texas Instruments Inc.'s digital micromirror devices (DMDs). But instead of tilting mirrors, the GLV devices utilize tiny structures that the company likens to ribbons and which resemble long, skinny suspension bridges. Applying an appropriate voltage pulls the ribbons down by means of electrostatic force, which turns them into diffractive, rather than reflective, devices.

"GLV devices offer a relatively simple solution for large-scale projectors when compared to other types of display components that use a two-dimensional array to re-create the entire image area," Corbin said. "Instead, GLV components generate a vertical line of 1,080 pixels only, which are scanned horizontally by a mirror to re-create the entire image of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels at the rate of 60 frames per second."

Each pixel in a linear GLV array "is capable of reproducing precise gray-scale values at the rate of millions of times per second — thousands of times faster than any other light modulator technology," he said.

Rob Corrigan, SLM's vice president of marketing, called the deal, announced Thursday (July 13), "the culmination of a long, ongoing, fruitful dialogue with Sony." He declined to discuss monetary terms, but noted that it involves "a pretty big number" and comprises an initial payment, "money spread over time and money tied to royalties down the road."

During the next six months, Corrigan said, "Silicon Light Machines will conduct a transfer program of GLV technology to Sony." After that, he anticipates that the companies will "collaborate over a period of some years to commercialize what we have today and figure out better ways to do things in the future."

Favored licensee

Asked if the company is comfortable with an exclusive licensing relationship, Corrigan said, "We're comfortable with just one licensee if it's Sony. They really have such a strong brand and channels and complementary product stuff all the way from digital cinema to handheld things. They really appreciate differentiation and are definitely not a 'me too' company in the way senior management sees things."

Sony has multiple display technologies and products in its stable, including Trinitron CRTs; front projectors based on Texas Instruments' DMD technology; and front projectors, rear-projection monitors and wearable monitors based on its own polysilicon active-matrix LCD technology.

The company is also licensed to develop displays based on the plasma-addressed liquid-crystal technology invented by Tektronix Inc., and in late 1998 it entered into joint development for field-emission displays with Candescent Technologies Corp. (San Jose, Calif.).

Meanwhile, SLM too has other irons in the fire. The company has an ongoing four-year relationship with Evans and Sutherland, a specialist in high-end simulators and cockpit displays. The deal with Sony will not affect the Evans and Sutherland arrangement, SLM said.

Further, SLM has been shipping prototype GLV devices to companies in the print industry for more than a year, with production-ready devices shipping in the last few months and "now getting bolted up into beta units," Corrigan said. Announcements of GLV-based products in this arena can be expected "within six weeks or so," he said.

Now, with a display relationship locked down with heavyweight Sony, "Silicon Light Machines will focus its efforts to develop products for other imaging applications and the rapidly growing field of optical communications," said president Corbin.

Added Corrigan, "There's a huge market opportunity in applying the know-how we've generated with displays toward optical communications."