Electronics Weekly puts its questions to an industry figure: Andy Stubbings is managing director of Noritake Itron in the UK

Can the vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs) which you develop continue to compete with lower cost LCD technologies?

VFD has traditionally had a greater visual impact through it’s inherent brightness and fast response allowing it to find a wide range of applications in the UK. As LCD catches up, we are making VFDs brighter and developing the support electronics to improve the customer’s ability to maximise the visual response and functionality at an acceptable price. The past ten years has seen production in the UK increase 4 fold with average sell price dropping from £60 to £24.

Itron is one of the few displays companies to manufacture in the UK, why is this and what are the benefits?

Our design and manufacturing operation in the UK is targeting the custom design market and we are continuously pushing the boundaries of VFD technology with low profile and high functionality products. Being close to our market, we can react faster than our competitors and develop rapid prototypes in parallel with an evolving specification to optimise cost and performance. Some products have more than 10 variants which can be evolved and delivered faster from a UK base.

Does the Government do enough to support UK based manufacturing companies like yours?

Local experience says if you know where to go and write a good justification it is possible to secure funding for a wide range of activities including capital projects, product research and training. There is an army of consultants out there with ever changing initiatives and late funding timescales which does not necessarily ensure an efficient transfer of public funds in a ‘spend it or lose it culture’.

Can you talk about an important VFD technology development which is in the pipeline?

Ninety per cent of our production employs chip-in-glass driver technology which has reduced the application cost of graphic VFD by up to 60 per cent. A new graphics controller has been developed for CIG integration with samples of 128x64 dot, 16 level gray scale product produced this month. A three phosphor ‘Y division’ pixel display giving 4096 colours has just completed custom development employing this controller.

Which are the main market opportunities for VFDs in Europe?

High end consumer, industrial, point of sale, transportation and gaming are our key markets. We are seeing increasing demand from these markets for Russian (Cyrillic) and Chinese character fonts and an upgrade from 2x16 and 2x20 character displays to graphic equivalent displays.