It sounds too good to be true – a large flat panel display technology which is; comparatively simple to manufacture, has a switching speed thousands to millions of times faster, improved gray levels and brilliant colors. But, true it is. Panorama Labs Pty. Ltd. from Perth, Western Australia is the company has developed just such a technology. The technology is a product of the company’s research, development and commercialization of breakthroughs in magneto-photonic technologies.

Panorama Lab’s Magneto Photonic Crystal (MPC) technology for flat panel displays integrates magneto-photonics and nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the manipulation of materials in the 100 nanometer range. To appreciate the scale, compare it to the width of a human hair at about 50,000 nanometers.

In the simplest terms, MPC involves polarized colored light from a laser passing through a Magneto Photonic Crystal. The polarization of the light is rotated by an amount proportional to a controlling magnetic coil embedded in the MPC block. The rotated beam of polarized light then passes through a laser polarizer. As the amount of light which can pass through the polarizer depends on its angle of polarization, the magnetic coil is in fact controlling light throughput like a throttle.

According to Panorama an MPC block is capable of:

• RGB color filtering
• Bandwidth control
• Polarization amplification through nano-stacking schemes
• Optical switching speeds in the 20nsec range – a thousands to millions of times improvement to contemporary technologies (compare to LCOS at 10 ms)
• Digital control providing more than 1024 gray levels
• Very low power requirements

Panorama is expecting very high resolutions of the order of 4,000 x 2,000 to be possible using MPC. MPC technology sounds set to take on the higher resolution standards 1440p and 2160p sometime in the near future. Better yet – there doesn’t appear to be a screen size limit to the technology.