The WAVE Report is Searchable on http://www.3dlinks.com -------------------------------------- 0527.2 Simulation Graphics 0527.3 Mobility Future 0527.4 OLED Breakthrough
0527.5 Network Threats
0527.6 Animation Software -------------------------------------- ***LASER 2005 Cannes, France This is one of the largest trade events devoted to laser technology. It is being held with two other conferences:
The Congress is research focused having many sessions and paper presentations while the LASER event is a trade show which fills 3 halls at the Munich ICM. One of the exhibitors stated that the Germans are strong in electro-optics and this is very evident here. The technology and applications are very diverse with a strong emphasis on automotive and medical uses. The WAVE Report set out to understand some of the market dynamics in VCSEL technology.
VCSEL, or Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser, is semiconductor microlaser diode that emits light in a cylindrical beam vertically from the surface of a fabricated wafer, and offers significant advantages when compared to the edge-emitting lasers currently used in the majority of fiber optic communications devices. The first VCSEL was commercially sold in 1996. The market experienced a very rapid growth to 25m units in 2000 but then fell on hard times. As of Q1 2005 a total of 35m units have been sold. The reason for the decline in sales rate is the primary application in fiber optics telecommunications. Now the industry is actively engaged in increasing the number of applications, including tracking. Products have been shipped at the following wave lengths (nm):
The target is 1550nm for fiber optics communication which most closely matches the performance of the fiber. Major suppliers of VCSELS are:
Advanced Optical Components was known as Honeywell before being acquired by Finisar. This division which made VCSEL Optical Products, resulted in cash proceeds of $74 million that created a pretax gain of $32 million (after-tax $14 million) in Q1 2004. It is estimated that Advanced Optical Components has 70%+ market share. http://www.advancedopticalcomponents.com/ This company is located in Texas as are some of the others. The location of this technology with the telecommunications sector is to be expected. But as the applications increase, it is expected that the supply base will also change – this is also reflected in the list of suppliers.
Both Panasonic and Sony have booths with laser diode products. When asked, Sony stated they are working on VCSEL for communications but this is not yet a product. Currently the Sony products include laser diodes, edge emitters, for DVD playback, DVD recording, Blu-ray disc, laser printers and digital copiers and a high power laser diode. Panasonic has none in production. Its laser diodes are listed mostly for pumping uses. Panasonic has reported on the development of a VCSEL which supports 12.5Gb/s communications rate using a 850nm device
We are seeing a greater presence of Chinese companies in optics than we ever have before. We picked up a publication called “Coverage of Laser Technology & Applied Optics.” There are two survey articles on VCSEL – both done in part by authors at the Changehun University of Science and Technology. Also shown in the publication are VCSELs being produced by Jilin Provincial Engineering Center for Semiconductor Laser Technology. This is cited as based on the Changehun Institute of Optics. The VCSELs cited include:
The WAVE went looking for Chinese companies making VCSELs. We were initially told there are two of which one of the largest producers of lased diodes is Hi-Tech Optoelectronics. This company is a joint venture between the China Energy Conservation Investment Corp. and the Institute of Semiconductors of the Chinese Academy of Science in 1999 on the base of the National Engineering Research Center Optoelectronic Devices. It not only increases its production but engages in R&D of optoelectronics devices. The primary products are Epi wafers, Laser Diode and Photodetector chips, Laser diode arrays, photodetectors, modules and testing systems. Its catalog has a broad offering and professionally done. In conversations it was disclosed they have no VCSELs and the other company given to us also does not have VCSELs. In spite of the hints that VCSELs are available in China as products, we can only conclude that the activity is confined to university research facilities. This is consistent with what we found at Electronica in Shanghai, China. Semiconductor optics technology is limited and only emerging in China. The center of expertise is the university. Given the difficulty in fabrication and early state of process control this would also limit the state of the technology in China, also based on what we saw at Electronica.
Buried in the OSRAM booth were samples of its 650nm VCSEL. When the WAVE spoke with Wolfgang Huber, the manager of the VCSEL product at OSRAM, he provided considerable insights into VCSEL market dynamics. VCSEL growth has stalled with the downturn of fiber optics communications and the industry is seeking new markets. The catch word is “sensors” but few know just what this means, except Agilent. The Agilent mouse laser is a sensor application which has high volume potential – just what is required to turn the market around. According to Wolfgang:
Agilent has a booth in the Fibercomm 2005 exhibition area. Given that they have 2 VCSELs listed on their web site for communications, we looked forward to speaking with them about the technology. The booth only had test instruments in it. We only presume a statement about the role that photonics and semiconductors plays given the intended divesture of this division.
Finding VCSEL technology is not easy, in spite of the many laser products being shown. When we found one in the Laser Components booth it was time to ask more questions.
The low yields are likely to related to the early product status of the 665nm laser. The 850nm is a more established product.
Epiworks is a spin-off of the University of Illinois which specializes in the epitaxial wafers to create both edge and surface laser emitters. Epiworks states it mission as:
The WAVE discussed the potential for silicon integration of VCSELs and this is not in the near term.
Having struggled through multiple conferences to unlock the dynamics behind VCSEL technology and market. Consider the following:
The WAVE also went looking for innovative optics technology. We found a number of impressive examples. viaoptic Every time the WAVE walked past this small stand it was packed. viaoptic is a German company, listed as an affiliate of Leica, making optical components in Germany. Their advantage is the ability to make injected molded optics with the precision of glass. Here are examples of the components:
Fraunhofer- Institute The Institute Siliziumtechnologie is specializing in 3D structuring of optical elements using Grey Tone Lithography. This is a capability to make arbitrary shaped height profiles in photo resists, silicon or siliconoxide on silicon wafers. These surfaces can then be transferred to metal by electroplating or embossed into polycarbonate. Some of the parameters include:
The surfaces can be specified mathematically. An example shown was a spherical micro lens array where the lenses were 150 microns X 150 microns. The curvature of the lenses is 440 microns. IAOPE The Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering was showing its capabilities in optics for microdisplays. These are cited as particularly demanding systems due to the need for high efficiency and low levels of reflected light. Examples of designs include:
IMOS Gubela IMOS described its capabilities in creating micro-optics and microstructures. They work with PPMA, polycarbonate and optical glass. Their glass structures include:
The structures can be as large as 100mm with grid pitches from .05mm to 6mm. Digital Optics This North Carolina company specializes in wafer based micro-optics. They do high efficiency diffractive optics, refractive optics and optical sub assemblies of these parts. One of the products is the ICE CUBE optical engine. This is a platform for the integration of passive and active optical elements. Through the use of wafer based integration and high speed die bonding they claim many benefits beyond the TO can. Leister Microsystems With headquarters in Switzerland, this company designs and fabricates micro-optics that include refractive microlens arrays and diffractive structures. The materials they can work with include:
The capability of the company includes: design, fabrication form samples to large volume production and systems. They also cite the ability to do MOEMS. One example of the designs they have done is microlens arrays in front of CCD sensors for digital cameras. Center for Advanced European Studies and Research They described work on digital holographic facial topometry. Using pulsed holography it is possible to construct very accurate 3D, i.e., sub-mm accuracy, profile with no motion blur (35ns pulse). It is also possible to construct a facial view that extends 270 degrees. Although not described as a biometric such a technique would certainly erase any issues on the accuracy of the recorded facial characteristics. LightTrans This small company in Jena, Germany has a state of the art optical engineering tool. They call it the photon management toolbox. The current version is 2.0 and coming is 3.0 at the end of 2005. The software has the ability to:
The software input is similar to a spreadsheet. This can define the light sources, media, optical interfaces, propagation operators and light detectors. The professional version of the software is $6k. The company also provides consulting services in advanced optical concepts and design. JCMWave The tag line is “True Solutions in Optics.” The software is a rigorous solution of Maxwell’s equations using a finite element method. The company has as its background a mathematical institute in Germany and they pride themselves with accuracy and performance. This software can even run on notebook computers. The solutions provide a complete vector description of the propagation of waves thus it is possible to support smooth and abrupt changes in refractive index, multiscale structures in 1D, 2D and 3D, photonic crystals and polarization effects. We discussed the ability to model VCSELs and the software is well adapted to this problem. Further it is possible to output wavefronts what can be input to more traditional optical design programs. The cost is $30k to $40k. ***Raydon and Boston Dynamics announce BARE-DI Daytona Beach, FL & Boston, MA Raydon and Boston Dynamics have announced their joint product incorporating the rendering power of Raydon's Better Approach Rendering Engine (BARE) and the unsurpassed human character animation of Boston Dynamics' DI-Guy. BARE is Raydon's DirectX 9-based Visuals API, featuring realtime simulation / training support. At present, over 1000 channels of the BARE Visuals API have been fielded on hardware platforms ranging from laptops to full multichannel visual systems since its introduction in 2001. Among many others, training systems such as the N-VLIP (desktop) to SIMNET XXI (multichannel image generator) feature the BARE Visuals API. BARE is neither a simple game engine nor a run-of-the-mill image generator, but it incorporates the advantages of both at an affordable price. BARE is designed to operate even its most cutting-edge effects at lock-step frame rates without the complexity and expense of proprietary hardware, and is constantly being upgraded and improved. DI-Guy is Boston Dynamics flagship product offering human characters for realtime simulation. DI-Guy includes over 200 characters and 2000 predefined motions. Some examples of the characters in the library are as follows: male and female pedestrians as well as children, a variety of First Responders such as police officers, firemen, and Hazardous Material characters, soldiers of all branches of the military, characters from other countries such as Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Specific characters such as Northern Alliance and Taliban are also provided. DI-Guy comes with an advanced motion engine for blending all motions as well as a robust API for tight integration within the visual system. DI-Guy utilizes OpenFlight for all characters and the motions may be altered using the DI-Guy Motion Editor. DI-Guy is a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) product with hundreds of users currently being delivered on many programs within the vis-sim community. The first product to merge the two technologies, BARE-DI is the result of an agreement and collaborative effort aimed at bringing DI-Guy functionality to all users of the popular Visuals API. Using BARE-DI, applications can not only take advantage of the industry's most robust Visuals API, but can do so using the simulation industry's de-facto standard in military, commercial and homeland security human character modeling. Most characters, motions, and scenarios previously built with Boston Dynamics DI-Guy Scenario tool will execute unchanged on BARE-DI, but will have available to them the power of BARE, including unique flexible weather / windshield effects, thermal, FLIR, night vision goggles modes with bloom, smear and Automatic Gain Control, defocus, crisp reticules, particles, procedural effects and impact effects, all enabled by BARE-DI's unique rendering ability and today's most capable DX9 COTS graphics cards from ATI and nVidia. BARE-DI is available now as a new purchase or as an upgrade for users of BARE software. ***Connected Workforce Book Indicates Employee Mobility Will Effect the Biggest Change in Working Practices Since Industrial Revolution LONDON A book signaling the way mobile technologies will fundamentally change the face of business, as they affect the manner in which people communicate and work together, has been published by Cisco Systems. Essays collected in Connected Workforce suggest that organizations are already reaping productivity benefits from employee mobility -- the creation of a virtual workplace wherever we are -- and that employees are taking more control of their work/life balance. The book also looks to the future and how the rapid expansion of mobile communications will have a profound impact on work practices, business strategies and on society as a whole. Edited by Cisco System's Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) Mobile team, Connected Workforce consists of 14 essays from senior business leaders, industry visionaries and innovative service providers. These include British Airways, Capgemini, France Telecom, Google, Hutchison Telecom, Intel, New York City, Reuters, Sprint, Telecom Italia Mobile and Vodafone. It brings together current case studies and future perspectives; giving a global view of how businesses are benefiting from distributing information through mobility solutions. A few are restructuring more fundamentally, embedding knowledge directly into new streamlined business processes. The book also reveals how telecommunication providers are investing heavily behind the scenes to secure, personalize and deliver the huge volumes of content available wirelessly to a workforce on the move. One of the contributors to Connected Workforce, Gino P Menchini, commissioner of IT and Telecommunications for New York City, discusses how the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001, prompted the city to review its working practices and embrace mobile technologies: "Increasingly New Yorkers are turning to mobile solutions in their businesses and in their private lives. We are seeing a massive change in the working culture for public employees, with the proliferation of wireless devices enabling personnel to connect to the City's network wherever they are, whatever the time of day." Barbara Dalibard, executive vice president, Enterprise Communications Services at France Telecom comments on the challenges mobility presents to service providers: "Making life simple for the user is a complex process. Our aim is for mobile connectivity to seem as serenely effortless as a swan gliding on the water. But beneath the surface there will inevitably be a great deal of hard paddling, in order to make different technologies and applications integrate and 'talk' to each other." In reviewing Connected Workforce, Dr David Dean of Boston Consulting comments: "This publication makes an important contribution to understanding the true potential of mobile technologies in the workplace. Besides demonstrating clearly that mobile applications are 'real,' it also underlines that the connected workplace will only be achieved if many different companies -- telecommunications companies, software providers and systems integrators -- work together across the value chain to deliver solutions that add value to their customers and their customers' customers." Connected Workforce is the sixth in a series of books produced by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group which gives current analysis on private and public sectors by international visionaries. Books already published include Connected Heath, Connected Cities, Connected Schools, Connected Government and Connected Homes. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/about/ac79/wp/ctd/index.html ***Universal Display Announces Fundamental Breakthrough in Blue Phosporescent OLEDS Ewing, NJ Universal Display Corporation has announced a fundamental technical achievement in the development of its blue PHOLEDTM phosphorescent OLED technology: a sky blue PHOLED with over 15,000 hours of operating lifetime. This is the first blue PHOLED which has broken through, by an order of magnitude, the 1,000 hour lifetime barrier – a challenge that some people thought might be insurmountable. The announcement was made today at Universal Display’s annual shareholders’ meeting, held in Philadelphia, PA. The Company’s proprietary blue PHOLED demonstrates a lifetime that exceeds 15,000 hours at 200 cd/m2, and also offers excellent efficiency, a trait for which the Company’s PHOLED technology is renowned, with 9.5% external quantum efficiency and 22 cd/A luminous efficiency. With CIE coordinates of (0.16, 0.37) and a 474 nm peak emission wavelength, which is equivalent to a sky blue color, this material system is not yet saturated enough for commercial full-color applications. Earlier this year, Universal Display had disclosed a deep blue PHOLED. The Company is now continuing its research efforts to unify the deep blue color, efficiency and lifetime in one system to meet the needs of the commercial OLED market. The quest for a long-lived blue phosphorescent OLED has been the subject of years of unshakable commitment and effort by the entire Universal Display research team, including scientists and engineers at Universal Display, PPG Industries, Princeton University and the University of Southern California. Discovered in the late 1990’s by Universal Display’s research partners at Princeton University, led by Professor Stephen R. Forrest, and the University of Southern California, led by Professor Mark E. Thompson, Universal Display’s proprietary PHOLED technology offers up to four times higher efficiency than conventional OLED technology – a feature that is very important for today’s battery-operated cell phones and other portable devices, as well as for tomorrow’s large-area TVs. Working with PPG Industries to develop and manufacture its proprietary PHOLED materials, Universal Display has reported a series of world-record performance achievements for its red and green PHOLED systems over the past few years. Leading electronic display manufacturers have been evaluating the Company’s red and green PHOLED technologies for use in commercial OLED products. Now with this blue PHOLED breakthrough, Universal Display is a step closer to an all-phosphorescent system that may provide significant benefits in OLED power efficiency for portable and large-area displays, as well as in other areas of organic electronics such as solid state lighting. http://www.universaldisplay.com ***Akonix Security Center Publishes IM Threat Watch for June 2005; Report Highlights Nearly 400% Increase in Attacks in Q2 2005 Compared to Previous Quarter SAN DIEGO Akonix Systems has announced that the Akonix Security Center team tracked 52 new threats targeting IM and P2P systems this past June. The Akonix Security Center issued 23 security policy updates, using the industry's only dynamic IM malware, SPIM and protocol update system. This automatically pushes updates to customers and blocks worms and viruses in real-time at the network perimeter. The latest Threat Watch indicates that IM and P2P security threats are continuing to grow as hackers become more advanced in attacking IM networks. This month saw an increased spread in IM worm variants and three new IM parent worms -- Aimsend, Harwig and Pinkton. During June, there were 22 variants of the Kelvir worm, three of the Opanki worm and three of the Oskabot worm. The high number of Kelvir worm variants is alarming, but consistent with the increasing trend in new Kelvir worms that was established over the first five months of 2005. Additionally, there was a nearly 400% increase in the number of attacks in the second quarter of 2005 as compared to the first quarter. Given the adaptive nature of these worms, their malicious payload and their skyrocketing frequency, the Akonix Security Center continues to caution organizations against leaving their network perimeter unprotected. The Akonix Security Center is a collaborative effort between Akonix's internal security group, enterprise customer security teams and industry leading partners in IM infrastructure and security focused on the emerging security threats posed by IM and P2P applications in the corporate environment. Detailed information about the June 2005 IM threats can be found at http://www.imsecuritycenter.com ***Toon Boom Studio V3 is Released Montreal Toon Boom Animation announced the release of Toon Boom Studio V3. Toon Boom Studio V3 has a number of new and enhanced features - including the new Text and Transform tools, as well as improvements to lip synching - that make it easy for you to create cut-out animation. According to Toon Boom Animation, Studio V3 is a great tool for playing with cut-outs: it includes a number of tools that simplify this animation style:
In addition, Toon Boom Studio V3 offers a simplified user interface as the Drawing and Sceneplanning modes are now one. Toon Boom will be showcasing Toon Boom Studio V3 at Flashforward New York, from July 6th to 8th, 2005. A Technology Showcase titled What will you animate now? will be held on July 7th, at 11:30 am in the Sutton Place, at the New Yorker Hotel. All orders that require shipping will be done during the month of July. All customers who purchase Toon Boom Studio V3 during the Pre-Sale Promo will receive their V3 license key(s) by email. -------------------------------------- Copyright 2005 4th WAVE, Inc. To subscribe to WAVE go to To unsubscribe also use the Wave Report Home page or send the preformatted UNSUBSCRIBE message: Previous issues of WAVE, as well as other info can be found at http://www.wave-report.com Comments on or questions about the WAVE may be sent to: or the below individuals below: John N. Latta - Editor-In-Chief Michael Robertson - Web Editor The WAVE Report may be redistributed in full for individual readership and posted to newsgroups, Web, and FTP sites. This publication may not be reprinted or redistributed for profit. Short quotes are permitted but must be attributed to the WAVE Report. 4th Wave retains the copyright to the WAVE Report.
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