RE: iFire news in Toronto Star..........?
"The reason current flat-panel displays are so expensive is because the technology needed to make them is expensive," said Schlam.
"The way you manufacture an LCD screen is very much how you'd manufacture a computer memory chip - it's very complex with very fine design rules. Plasma also has expensive manufacturing issues. IFire's technology suggests you can make the same thing but at a significantly lower expense."
IFire's roots date back to the early 1990s, when a research project caught the attention of Calgary-based Westaim. In 1993, the company was granted its first patent for a flat-panel device and in 1996 it produced its first prototype - a 5 inch colour display.
The problem iFire faced was getting its technology to produce the same kind of clarity and intensity as other displays - and to produce images in full colour. While the display technology iFire was toying with had been around and in use in laptop computers for a long time, it wasn't strong or sophisticated enough to produce the red, green and blue colours needed to reproduce real-life, real-time images.
It wasn't until 1997 that iFire's team came up with a way to produce a blue glow strong and stable enough to make the over-all image look real. Similar to a regular TV set, iFire produces a layer of phosphor - a substance that produces light when excited by an electrical charge - to glow and form screen images line by line until being refreshed by antoher electrical charge, forming into what people see as a moving picture.
But still it could only do it with smaller-scale, flat-panel screens in the 5-inch range.
The company plodded along continuing to work on refining the TDEL process and making it work on larger, flat-panel screens. As it inched closer to finding a way to produce images in a different and cheaper way, investors and other companies began to catch on.
In 2000, iFire signed a licensing deal with TDK Corp. of Japan worth $25 million (US>) to develop its TDEL technology for displays less than 12 inches. It got another $30 million (Canadian) in 2001 from Technology Partnerships Canada. It inked a collaboration deal with Sanyo Electric Company Ltd. in 2002, which expanded to include 30-inch displays, and a manufacturing deal with Japan's Dai Nippon Printing Co. Ltd. in March, 2003.
But the home run came in April of last year, when iFire announced it had figured out how to use a single, high-performance phosphor system instead of the traditional triple-patterned, red, green and blue system, simplifying the manufacturing process even more and making the units even cheaper to produce.
It called the method "Color-by-blue" because every dot on the screen comes from the blue phosphor material. Secondary phosphors convert the blue light to the red and green wave-lengths needed to produce a full-coulour picture.
IFire currently holds more than 100 patents and applications worldwide related to its TDEL technology, processes and materials. It makes its flat-panel screens using a process that is similar to silk-screening, where it layers phosphors, eletrodes and dielectric panels on top of a glass panel to produce a display.
For Westaim, the commercial success is a long time in coming. The company has been nurturing iFire for more than a decade and is hoping to see a payoff from its investment.
But analysts see light at the end of the tunnel for both companies; while you won't see an iFire product on a store shelf any earlier than 2006 and you'll likelly never see iFire's or Westaim's name directly on a TV set, hoped-for and pending partnerships with other set manufacturers mean revenues and profits could come rolling in as soon as this year.
This bodes well for Westaim's share price, which trades on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The company's stock is essentially flat since the start of the year, though it has gained 74 per cent from its 12-month low of $1.65 (US.). It ended the day Friday at $2.90, up 2.84 per cent, on the Nasdaq. On the Toronto stock Exchange, where it also trades, the stock finished the day Friday up 2.13 per cent at $3.83 (Canadian).
"In our opinion, the market is discounting very little, if any success in the iFire technology, and therein lies the opportunity," wrote Paradigm Capital analyst Marvin Woolf in a recent research report on the company. He has a "strong buy" rating on Westaim, with a one-year target price of $12(U.S.) - more than four times where it trades now .
-to be continue-