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Daily News Updates
Sunday April 4, 1999
The Spring 1999 MRS meeting commenced in San
Francisco.  The meeting promises to be
the largest MRS spring meeting ever with 34 symposia scheduled.
As attendees began to come in at a rapid rate, registration counters
were kept busy throughout the evening beginning at 5:00 pm.
Technical sessions are slated to begin on
Monday, April 5. However, the technical program began this afternoon
with a tutorial on flat panel displays titled "Technical
Overview of the Flat Panel Display Industry". Dr. J. Norman
Bardsley, Director of Industry Roadmaps and Standards for the
U.S. Display consortium gave an overview of various types of
flat panel displays including liquid crystal displays (LCD),
field emission displays (FED), plasma display panels (PDP), electroluminescence
(EL), organic light emitting diodes (OLED) and projection displays.
He started with basics and went on to discuss  positive
and negative aspects for each technology. He also mentioned relevant
industrial information such as expected demand over the next
several years. Dr. Bardsley described various materials issues
of concern including substrates, electrodes, photomasks, photoresists,
spacers, electrical connectors and antireflection films. He also
ran through various current and anticipated applications for
FPDs. He concluded by suggesting that "materials research,
development and processing are key to FPD design and fabrication".
He also suggested that researchers should enjoy the research
but not at the neglect of the problems and economics of manufacturing.
Additional information is available at : www.usdc.org
Jerzy Kanicki of the University of Michigan
continued the tutorial with a detailed look at transmissive and
reflective active matrix LCDs, and OLEDs, including materials
realted issues. He indicated that a full color 12.1" reflective
AMLCD display prototype has been fabricated using a-Si:H TFT
active-matrix aray which exhibits optical performance comparable
to color pictures in a newspaper and high resolutions and full
color is possible for specific AMLCDs. Bright OLEDs have also
been successfully fabricated at various laboratories though various
other issues including reliability and cost need to be addressed.
Active matrix OLEDs are expected to play a key rloe in the next
generation of multimedia devices.
As at previous MRS meetings, 
a student mixer was held in the evening. This gives students
a forum to mingle, interact and network.A number of materials
researchers including MRS officers attended the mixer giving
students the chance to meet and talk with people in the field.
Various other events are scheduled for the week aimed specifically
at students including the graduate student awards presentations
and the job center.
Two interactive displays that reside in the
 lobby of MRS headquarters
were transported to the meeting site and were the center of attraction
in the registration area. One is a diffusion machine showing
diffusion of interstitial atoms through fcc, bcc and hcp crystal
lattices. The other is a Polage
designed by Austine Wood-Comarow (www.austine.com).
The polage is an art form that uses cellophane. Ordinarily the
Polage appears to be mostly gray with areas of color showing
microscopic images of materials. Viewed through a polarizing
filter, the Polage dramatically comes to life showing macroscopic
applications of a particular material. More information is available
at www.austine.com/art/matters.shtml.
[Please contact the Web Editor, Gopal Rao
(webmaster@mrs.org) with
questions, comments or suggestions]
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