Moving from prototype to volume production is where a company finds out if its products can be made at a reasonable cost. It is a key moment for a company and Cambridge-based large screen firm Screen Technology has arrived at that crossroads.
“We floated on 1 August on AIM and raised £7.9m, £7.1m net. We were raising money to increase production capacity,” explains Tony Kellett, CEO at Screen.
Initial production was established with a sub-contract manufacturer nearby in Ely which currently supplies low volume, 10m² of display screen per month. Because Screen Technology’s displays are manufactured in tiles which are then assembled together, the firm measures its production in terms of space.
The firm is currently negotiating with the Ely subcontract manufacturer to double the space dedicated to Screen’s production, says Kellett. By the end of January the firm expects to have double the capacity and the volume production version of Screen’s tooling equipment being developed will manage 65m² a month.
But this facility has a smaller role for the firm’s medium term plans. “With the size of our opportunity we need volume. We will be a virtual manufacturer but the critical part of our process, the tooling development, we will have made for us,” says Kellett.
That tooling consists of equipment to mould optical light guides which are then used, in a further piece of equipment, to build a face plate. “What we are doing now is developing the mould tools and face plate manufacture for high capacity. A lot of our IP is in this tooling,” says Kellett.
While Screen will own this key equipment, it will be located at subcontract manufacturing partners who will operate it. Those subcontract manufacturers, envisages Kellett, will be at a number of different sites worldwide.
The demand for its screens is such that this move to volume production is a key moment for the firm. “We have enquiries for several millions of business. At the moment we can build ones or twos. We really think in terms of m² and customers are talking about ordering 100s of m², which is obviously beyond our current capacity,” says Kellett.
The firm’s focus now is to get the volume production equipment developed and running, which it plans to have operational next summer.
Kellett says customers are clearly interested in the screens that are possible. “Our key strength is the combination of size, resolution and brightness that no one else can meet.”
At the moment its smallest screen is 68in. but a standard screen is 150in. and above, says Kellett. Brightness is 2,000Cd/m² but the ability to tile a display to any shape is unique. “People have a space they want to fill and we can make any array size. People have asked for displays four or five metres high and one metre wide. We had one enquiry for a screen 150m wide and less than 1m high,” says Kellett. The unusual shaped displays are for places such as sports grounds or financial exchanges.
Resolution, says Kellett, is 30 times the number of pixels per unit area currently available from other large displays on the market. Fill factor of the screen is 95 per cent which means the screens still look good close up rather than breaking up into pixels as some large displays do.
Screen Technology currently has 17 staff and the firm is negotiating more office space and will double in size by the end of next year, says Kellett. Engineers, business development staff and managers for production engineering and for subcontract agreements will be taken on.
The first customer at the firm will be a rental company in the exhibitions market and other orders are for Dubai and Finland. “Our initial markets are railways and airports for information and advertising display… We had one trial with a potential customer in a shop window in Paris. From the other side of the road the display was very clear,” says Kellett.
At 85in. the screens are suited to XGA, at 108in. it is wide XGA and is close to HDDTV720, and at 153in. it is HDDTV1080.
Longer term technology possibilities are getting Screen Technology’s ITrans LCD technology on other platforms. “Actually it is a very nice match with OLED. Our optics are not tied to LCD screens, we can put it on plasma and OLED. OLED is still some way off though,” says Kellett, hence the current focus on getting iTrans up to volume production.
Moving large displays to high volume production is a big job but with the money raised on AIM, the firm is on target to have a huge impact on its market, estimated to be worth £1.6bn by 2010. The firm’s progress over the coming year will be of great interest.
www.screentechnology.com