A consortium led by Beaverton, Oregon-based Planar Systems Inc’s subsidiary Planar America has won a $15m award from the US Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop technologies necessary to manufacture high performance flat panel displays. The two-year cost-share programme, in which the consortium will match the government’s money, is another prong in the US government’s efforts to wrest back the flat panel display industry from the Japanese and Koreans. Last year the US Department of Defense Technology Reinvestment gave the consortium $29.2m to pursue the development of the displays (CI No 2,531) and this is just part of the money the US has pumped into flat panels in recent years. The new grant will be used to develop high-performance electroluminescent displays for defence systems in full colour, and active matrix electroluminescent display technologies. Working with Planar as co-developers on the programme will be AlliedSignal Inc, Computing Devices of Canada Ltd, Advanced Technology Materials Inc, Boeing Co, CVC Products, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Hewlett-Packard Co, Honeywell Inc, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oregon State University, Positive Technologies and the University of Florida. Dr Mark Hartney, programme manager in the agency’s electronic systems technology office said Displays are critical components in most of the advanced defence systems in use today and the need for next generation flat-panel colour displays and head-mounted systems is accelerating.
