King
of the pixels
Plasma pioneer is still inventing
By BOB ROZYCKI
Larry Weber in front
of a large-screen plasma TV.
You’re
probably not thinking pixels or plasma when you admire
the smooth skin of Eva Longoria or the handsome looks
of Dr. McDreamy or the vivid almost reach-out-and-touch
realism of a football game, but without them your viewing
experience would be greatly diminished.
But don’t ask Larry Weber about his favorite
TV show; he doesn’t watch TV. A bit ironic considering
that Weber is the pioneer of the large-screen plasma
displays that now dominate today’s home-entertainment
industry with sales in excess of $21 billion worldwide.
And he did it at a former apple-juice factory in
Highland.
While he did not invent plasma display,
Weber learned firsthand at the knees of its inventors
Donald Bitzer and Gene Slottow while an undergrad
at the University of Illinois.
Plasma displays didn’t start out as a product
meant to replace the cathode ray tube (CRT) of TV
sets.
“They were designing it for computer education
because in ‘64 there really wasn’t a suitable display
that would hold graphics. Now, graphics are very
common. In ‘64 you had a teletype; if you’re lucky
you had an alphanumeric CRT terminal, but that was
a really advanced thing. The computer in ‘64 that
he put his first terminal on was a vacuum tube computer,
an Illiac One. It was a very primitive computer,”
Weber said.
Bitzer and Slottow realized that they needed
a display that could hold graphics and also had
to have memory because “memory in those days was
unbelievably expensive,” Weber said. The best memory
back then was core memory, which was very expensive.
“Instead, you had to use some cheaper form of memory,
which wasn’t very good, it would fade and the image
would disappear on you while you were watching it.”
So Bitzer and Slottow came up with their
invention, plasma display, which solved these problems.
“It had inherent memory; each pixel had its own
little memory right inside it. You don’t have to
have a semiconductor chip or RAM memory. Without
that memory feature we wouldn’t be able to have
big, bright plasma displays that we have today.”
University days
Weber was an undergraduate at the University
of Illinois when he met Bitzer and Slottow and first
saw their plasma display. He was unimpressed.
“I just thought this looks like some professor’s
pet project. It doesn’t look like at all like something
that’s going to ever amount to anything. It was
just a few pixels; quite primitive.”
Others were working on plasma displays
and gas-discharge displays in the early 1960s, but
this particular invention had a new twist. “It had
memory and it could be made practical.”
While the first display had a few scant
pixels, in 1971 they had a 12-inch diagonal screen
with full graphics. In just seven years, they went
from one pixel to a screen that that had a quarter-million
pixels.
“Because it was practical; it solved some
practical problems that earlier devices hadn’t solved,”
Weber said. “And not only that, Bitzer was a good
salesman. He could convince a major industry, he
could convince IBM (to invest)”.
In 1969, IBM made an advance royalty payment
of $1 million for this technology, he said. “And
that was a lot. And it (the display) didn’t look
so good back in those days.”
Weber remained unexcited about the invention,
but he enjoyed working with the two men. Weber did
his master’s thesis on the plasma display and eventually
became a professor at Illinois working with the
professors and going on to distinguish himself in
the plasma-display area.
Larry Weber and the 60-inch display screen his company developed.
But the invention was essentially ahead
of its time, outdistancing liquid crystal and other
technologies for flat-panel displays. The personal
computer had not yet been invented, “so people didn’t
know what to do with graphics.” Interest came from
the military, which used the plasma displays in
AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) planes.
The military used it in other programs as well,
Weber said, citing the need for rugged, lightweight,
high-performance displays. With the advent of computers,
plasma screens started appearing.
Bad news, good news
Weber created two key inventions while
at the university. One was for the high-contrast
ratio on a plasma display and the other was the
energy recovery sustained circuit, which cuts out
a substantial amount of power in a 42- or so-inch
plasma display.
“I had good inventions, but no one wanted
them in 1987. The energy sustained circuit; nobody
wanted it. That’s worthless (they said). I had to
start a company to put that invention into a product
that I designed.
“My professor taught me, the job isn’t
done until you transferred the idea to industry.”
“Everyone in the world now uses that energy
recovery sustained circuit in their plasma displays.
And almost all the companies -- four out of five
-- use the contrast ratio idea.”
In 1987, he woke up to find out that IBM,
which had the world’s largest plant for manufacturing
plasma displays, was getting out of the business.
IBM was preceded by a who’s who of U.S. companies
that had gotten out of manufacturing plasma displays.
A year earlier it was AT&T, which had followed
Texas Instruments, NCR, Owens-Illinois and Burroughs.
At that point, Weber had worked with plasma
for some 17 years; the news that IBM was giving
up was shattering.
“I said, ‘Gee this is a disaster.’ I had
spent all this time working on this developing good
stuff, getting a reputation, got some awards, and
I know some solutions and this is good technology
and it’s gone.”
After a month of feeling depressed, Weber
realized an opportunity actually availed itself
to him. So with little money, he set off to Kingston,
where IBM had made the displays, with the hope of
buying all their manufacturing equipment.
“I was able to find a couple of guys within
IBM (Stephen Globus and James Kehoe) who were as
interested as I was in trying to continue the operation.
So I joined up with them and brought one of my students
along and the four of us started this little company
called Plasmaco.”
IBM was making 3,290 plasma-display terminals,
“some people called them quad panels because you
could put four times the amount of information on
the panel than you could with any other kind of
terminal,” Weber said. The display was considered
monochrome, although it was orange and black.
“It was a good product, big companies like
Blue Cross-Blue Shield, Federal Express, they loved
this thing. IBM was making money. But this was IBM’s
major mainframe factory. As a mainframe factory,
what are they gonna make? They’re gonna make mainframes
over these computer terminals and they needed space.”
In 1987, IBM had a shortage of space. So that was
the end of its plasma-display program.
Weber’s company had a name, but it needed
a place for the 88 tractor-truckloads of equipment
he got from IBM. He had a small Cessna, so he started
flying around Ulster County and the region looking
for “big buildings with empty parking lots.” He
found a few only to find out the building were already
filled with IBM equipment. IBM was so short of space,
he said, that they would buy up old large buildings
for storage.
More bad news
Plasmaco ended up in an old apple-juice
factory in Highland on South Street. The building
was going to be used as storage for all the manufacturing
equipment.
“We raised $750,000 to move the equipment
out of IBM and store it for six months. And then
we were gonna raise our big money, which we figured
was about $7 million to put all the equipment back
together again.”
Plasmaco moved the equipment in August1987
and signed a deal in September with a New York City
firm that was going to obtain funding for the new
company.
In October, the stock market crashed. The
firm, which “had the second-oldest seat on the New
York Stock Exchange,” was devastated. By the end
of the year, it went from 300 employees down to
one.
“That person’s one asset was our deal.
He said don’t worry, I’ll find money. That didn’t
happen.”
Weber had the world’s largest plant and
a nice plasma-display unit used for demonstrations.
What he didn’t have was money. He lost two years
before receiving funding in August 1989. They were
ready to go to market in the summer of 1991, but
liquid crystal had just come out with a color display.
That meant the end of the plasma industry selling
monochrome displays.
Plasmaco’s board of directors didn’t understand;
“they wanted to blame someone, so they fired the
other three guys and kept me on because I was the
chief technology officer.”
A turnaround expert was hired. “After a
month and a half, he turned around and left,” Weber
said. “He said this was a hopeless situation. So
the board turned to me and said, ‘Larry, you’re
the only officer left, we’d like to make you our
acting president. And as acting president, tomorrow
we’d like to have you fire half the people.”
So, he fired some 30 people. But he still
had 30 people to work with.
“We were doomed because we had this monochrome
product, a wonderful product, customers loved it.”
But because liquid crystal was in color, plasma
display was going to die.
“The board, to show how little they understood,
they passed a resolution that prohibited me from
working on color,” he says laughing. “They said,
‘Larry, your job is to make these monochrome panels
a success.” They were taking a short-term view.
We got a product, we want to make money off this
product; we don’t want to redevelop for the future.
But they didn’t realize how quickly the future was
coming.”
Desperate measures
The company was in bad shape. It continued
to make and sell the monochrome displays. But in
January 1994, Weber got an idea. He called his 11
technical people together and told them they were
going to make a full-color TV panel and they would
show it at the next Society for Information Display
(SID) symposium in San Jose, Calif., in June, less
than six months away. And they would have to do
it without the board’s knowledge.
Things went well until March, when he needed
$80,000 for parts. Weber couldn’t go to the board.
A Boston bank was threatening foreclosure because
Plasmaco defaulted on a loan. So Weber took a gamble
and went to Boston and told the banker of his dream
about inventing a color plasma display panel. “I
said, ‘Mr. Banker, if you foreclose on us next,
you’re gonna get 2 or 3 cents on the dollar. If
you wait until I develop this color panel, and then
try to sell the technology to somebody, you won’t
get your money back, but you might get 40 cents
on the dollar.”
The banker agreed to give Weber a chance,
but with conditions. He had to show the new panel
at the SID show and he had to sign a document that
stated if Weber didn’t show the display, the bank
would be able to foreclose.
So Weber took the deal back to the board
who was expecting the bank to foreclose in the next
two weeks. “All of a sudden I was the biggest hero.
‘Wow! We got till June?’ Things were so desperate
they were happy to do that.”
One other condition of the bank was Weber
had to raise $80,000 for the equipment by the following
week. Weber found a group willing to put up $40,000,
but finding the rest was the hardest money he had
to raise. He turned to his wife, Jane, and said
he wanted to put their money into the deal. “We’ll
never see the money again,” he told her, but it
was very important that he be able to show people
that he could create a color panel.
She said OK and that tipped the balance
for another investor to add his money. They met
the first requirement of the bank.
But there wasn’t much time left until the
show, especially to build a 21-inch color panel.
Time ticked away. The first panel came out of the
oven and the technicians were able to light it up,
proving the electrodes were good. But they needed
to put a color image on it. Since the display and
the electronics were being developed in parallel,
the technicians couldn’t test the two until both
were finished. The electronics were hooked up to
the panel just two days before the show. It didn’t
work. For two straight days everyone worked on the
problem. They finally detected a slight change as
they moved the computer mouse. Good enough. The
equipment was boxed up and Weber and an engineer
hopped a flight to San Jose.
Weber had a friend who had a garage 10
blocks from the San Jose Convention Center. Weber
and an engineer started working Sunday night straight
through noon of Thursday, two hours before the show
was to close. He had a booth with an engineer who
promised that something exciting was coming. Others
hoped Weber would fall on his face.
“I got these great panels, but no good
electronics.” So he soldered red, green and blue
pixels and “lit it up like a beer sign.”
It was noon, two hours before the show
was to end. So he hauled the display to the convention
center. “My competitors were all wondering what
was going on. The press was there. Panasonic was
there. I turned it on and everybody’s jaw dropped.
“What a beautiful display.” He laughs. The colors
are so bright and clear, they said. “It’s because
I hardwired them,” he laughs.
The black was so black because he never
wired those pixels up. “The contrast ratio was phenomenal.
We passed the test. Got our picture in a magazine.
The banker didn’t know we cheated.”
Big really is better
Flying back to Highland, Weber still had
a problem. He started analyzing everything. A month
later he realized the voltage waveform that he used
was wrong. He had used a waveform that Fujitsu had
published. However, Fujitsu had not included critical
details. So it was up to Weber to troubleshoot it.
Along the way he invented something that had excellent
contrast ratio with power on all pixels.
He showed the new display in August 1994,
Panasonic saw it and was quite interested in it.
Panasonic had been using another plasma technology
called DC (direct current) plasma; Weber used AC
(alternating current).
“When I showed them this panel with better
contrast than their DC, they gave me money for development.”
Things got better and better with Plasmaco
hiring back some of the people who were fired. Up
to 30 people by 1995. In January 1996, Matsushita
Electric Industrial Co. bought the company. Plasmaco
became a wholly owned subsidiary of Panasonic, a
unit of Matsushita. Weber stayed on as president
and chief executive officer.
Panasonic was the first to put Weber’s
contrast-ratio idea into production. “When they
made their first product in ‘97 or ‘98, they were
dead last in terms of plasma display because they
had gone down the DC route.” A switch to AC helped
turn them around, Weber said. Now, Panasonic is
the world’s number-one plasma -display manufacturer.
And they manufacture not only the plasma displays
but also the TV sets. Panasonic is using Weber’s
invention in every panel.
After Panasonic took over, Weber could
worry less about the budget and focus more on work.
“Plasma, one of its real assets is it can
be big. At that time the biggest panel was 42-inch.
It’s the most popular size panel people buy today.
There’s something real special about being big.
We recognize that high-definition television needs
a big display. And the reason it needs a big display
isn’t immediately obvious. It’s because of your
eye.”
The size of the room decides how far away
a person sits from a TV. It ends up about 10 feet
in the United States.
“If you’re 10 feet away, the smallest thing
you can see is about a millimeter, about 25th of
an inch. Not very much. If you have a high-definition
signal and it’s got 1,920 by 1,080 pixels, (and)
if I put that 10 feet away and I don’t make those
pixels at least one millimeter, I’m going to be
wasting those pixels.”
“If you take 1,920 by 1,080 (pixels) and
use 1 millimeter as your pixel, your display needs
to be at least 80 inches in diagonal. So that says
in order to see high-definition television, you
need a big screen; it’s a requirement, it is not
an option.”
So in 1996, Weber and his technicians set
about to make a 60-inch plasma display. Nobody made
one that big before. Nobody had the equipment. Weber
had to go all over the world to try and convince
people to build gigantic equipment; and nobody really
believed he could do it. He managed to convince
a couple companies to build the equipment.
“We made the first high-quality 60-inch
plasma display in Highland. We showed it to the
world in 1999. People couldn’t believe how good
it looked.” It was because of this thing with the
eye. We taught the world you can make 60-inch plasma
panels.”
Panasonic didn’t think much of it at first,
he said. And then Panasonic came around. “They now
have a 103-inch product using the technology we
developed at Plasmaco,” he said.
“What Plasmaco did was not only show the
world how to do high-contrast ratio, but also show
that large displays are really important and quite
practical. And now a 60-inch panel doesn’t look
that big anymore.”
The next big thing
Even though he retired three years ago,
Weber is still working, mostly for free.
He is now the unpaid president of the 7,000-member
Society for Information Display and works for the
International Electric Technical Commission, a standards
group.
Weber is also working on “the biggest invention
he has ever done, if it works, that is.”
It turns out there’s major problem that
hasn’t been solved yet for plasma displays.
“If you take these displays, they’re big
and beautiful and they’re actually quite power efficient.
A lot of people say liquid crystal takes less power;
that’s not true. It takes the same power. But plasma
has a tremendous potential for improving that.”
And that is what Weber is working on. He
won’t say any more, other than if he is successful
his invention could turn the laptop world upside
down by replacing liquid crystal displays with plasma.
