The Army's SBIR from 2007 kicking off the development of Direct Patterning for Microdisplays.

Sculley seemed a wee bit tired today but he sprang to life when referring to Direct Patterning when he said" It worked, we can do it." That for me was today's highlight. That's the Grail.

"The advantages of indirect view vision systems are becoming apparent in the modern battlefield. The transition from current direct view (photon coupled) night vision goggle systems to indirect view (electronically coupled) systems is dependent upon the ability to achieve comparable resolution and power consumption to currently fielded systems. The micro display is a key component in the indirect view system and as such must address the resolution and power consumption issue head on. Near term planned head mounted display (HMD) research approaches are addressing these issues through chip level electronic integration and parallel processing to reduce data handling requirements. Novel materials and processes are sought to develop a high resolution micro-display with both improved electro-optical performance and greater power efficiency. Currently developing micro-displays for military applications use broadband emitters that are subsequently filtered to provide the sub-pixel red, green, and blue (RGB) colors. The color filtering exacerbates the already difficult problem of providing sufficient brightness in a small pixel (~15 um) micro-display architecture. Since each sub-pixel must discard approximately 2/3 of the broadband emissions, the resultant color filtered display luminance is reduced to one third of the original emitter/modulator luminance. Direct patterning emissive sub-pixels will provide a 3X increase in micro-display brightness that translates directly into reduced power and increased micro-display component operational life. The elimination of the color filters will also provide increased color fidelity in the display. Three separate, narrow band emitters will provide a color gamut that meets or exceeds current NTSC display standards thereby providing improved distinction and recognition of color coded data, such as maps, IFF, and chroma-keyed image fusion algorithms. Due to the high bandwidth of 2K x 2K, full color video information, high density micro-display approaches are anticipated to require 3D silicon architectures. These micro-displays must exhibit the fundamental parameters of resolution, luminance contrast, chromatic fidelity yet may not sacrifice power efficiency, thermal management, and operational lifetime to achieve electro-optical performance goals. These factors shall be achieved for display luminance levels > 50 fL operation. This topic is considered to be an enabling technology for solid state night vision system-on-chip concepts. "