Ultimately, by using a new, ultrasensitive polymer as the screen, Conemac plans to reduce the thickness of the display to just one inch. Sometimes boredom is the mother of invention. It was for Thomas Buzak. When a project he was working on at the electronics firm Tektronix in Beaverton, Oregon, was canceled a few years ago, the electrical engineer began casting around for something else to do. Buzak's invention combines the best of two technologies for flat-panel displays.
Plasma displays can be large, but they are hard to see in a well-lit room.
The screen consists of three layers. On the bottom are rows of tiny grooves that run left to right. The top layer is a series of electrical wires running up and down. Sandwiched between this grid is a layer of liquid crystals, similar to the ones in a watch or a laptop computer display, which turn from dark to light in the presence of electricity. To lighten any one point of the screen, an electric signal is sent through a vertical wire while a row of plasma is activated.