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Paving The Path For An Alomost Two-Dimensional TV and PC Monitors

PAVING THE PATH FOR AN ALMOST TWO-DIMENSIONAL TV AND PC MONITORS
By Janhavi Rao

Have you ever thought that your PC monitor is occupying too much of space on your desktop? Or have you ever wondered how nice it would be to have a slim and sleeky TV set which you can almost hang on the wall? One time or the other, almost everyone of us might have been annoyed by the bulkiness and heaviness of these inevitable items. Now the problem is solved by the innovations at Sage Inc., a young company that has become one of the leading suppliers of embedded electronics for the flat panel display (FPD) industry under the dynamic leadership and vision of its founder and CEO Chandrashekar Reddy.

Sage solutions enable the replacing of the traditional bulk and heavy CRT monitors by lean and light FPD monitors. These FPD monitors not only provide clear and sharp images, even at the edges, but also occupy very little desk space and consume only a fraction of the power of the CRT monitors. But there is a price for it. The FPD monitors are considerably more expensive than the CRT monitors. Only if the price of FPDs falls can the ordinary people buy it. The FPD technology and the process are new and that makes it more expensive. Eventually everybody will use only FPD compared to CRT and the price is expected to go down, says Reddy.

The Background

Chandrashekar Reddy holds a BSEE degree from IIT Madras and an MSEE degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Ever since he got his masterŐs degree he had the vision of an entrepreneur and he had always been looking for new product ideas that would click in the market. Prior to founding Sage in 1994, Chandrashekar Reddy held various design and program management positions at Intel, where his focus was on VLSI designs and architectures for PC products, such as graphics and multimedia chipsets and advanced microprocessors. Reddy, while managing a design team for notebook controllers at Intel in 1988, thought that FPDs would be the ideal future monitors for PCs and workstations. At that time the flat panel technology was just emerging in the notebook market. The technology was still new and FPDs were in no way equivalent to the CRTs both qualitywise and pricewise. But having seen the development in microprocessor industry, Reddy believed that the FPD technology would be refined during the course of time. In 1994, when Sharp, Samsung and GoldStar entered the FPD business, Reddy realized that that was the right time for him to start the business.

FPD monitors require specialized electronics that no other companies were addressing at that time. If all the CRTs that existed were to be replaced by FPDs, Reddy thought, there was a huge market and there was no competition. It would take about a year to develop a controller circuit for FPDs, Reddy calculated, and by then the market would be mature to consume his product. So, Reddy quit Intel and founded Sage Inc. in May 1994, with the goal to develop IC-based controllers to enable FPD monitors.

Initially he raised funds from friends, family and his own savings. Since that was not sufficient, Sage developed system level products to address industrial, instrumentation and medical markets and revenue started flowing in. He raised funds from angel investors also and he had two million dollars including his own $500,000. Lastly, in mid-1998, Sage raised another six million dollars in an investment round by San Jose based VentureStar.

The Company

Founded in 1994, Sage has now become the FPD industry's leading supplier of embedded electronics for FPD monitors. Flat panel vendors and monitor manufacturers rely on Sage to provide the critical connectivity solutions that drive the FPDs for highly cost-conscious PC and consumer TV markets.

Sage is located in Santa Clara, CA, and it has 60 employees. The strength is in diversity but there is no difference in their vision. They work with common goals and vision, says Reddy. It has a world-class design center in Bangalore, India, where some of India's brilliant, fresh engineering graduates are employed. Sage provides an excellent environment to its employees, where they can see their actual products reach the market. While the Santa Clara team architects new products, the Indian team actually develops them, based on the feedback from customers, marketing and sales. The first and second generation products were developed at Bangalore and the third and fourth generation products are in progress. Sage's customer sites are positioned with India-trained employees.

Sage doesn't have a manufacturing unit and most of its manufacturing is done offshore. They have foundries in other countries: Chips are made in Japan and boards are prepared locally.

The Product

The two important elements of FPDs are the screens themselves and the specialized electronics that drive the screens. These embedded electronics enable video signals to be displayed on a digital display.

Sage's technology allows the use of FPD monitors in the place of CRT monitors. Sage has developed a custom ASIC, as well as the necessary firmware, software and supporting hardware components, in order to present to its customers a comprehensive, single chip solution that is simple and cost-effective to implement.

Sage products allow monitor manufacturers to produce flat panel monitors that provide plug and play connectivity regardless of the type of FPD screen, resolution or image source, without requiring any changes in the end-user's existing video controller, connector or calling. sage supports flat panels from all major manufacturers, including Fujitsu, Hitachi, Kyocera, LG, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, NEC, Optrex, Philips/Hosiden, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp and Toshiba.

Sage's cheetah technology is available in three forms: as an ASIC, a reference design and an OEM board-level solution. Customers can choose the level of product that fits best with their business and manufacturing model.

Sage's Cheetah2 IC is the first flat panel monitor controller in the market to provide all the functions required for true plug and play flat panel monitor performance. It is a cost-effective high-quality, feature-rich solution which supports either a standard analog or digital interface.

Puma enables the display of analog TV signals on an FPD or plasma display. Puma mounts behind the flat panel to create an LCD or plasma TV. Utilizing sage's proprietary Cheetah2 IC, the Puma board features high-quality interpolation scaling capabilities, noise reduction filters and On Screen Display interface support.

The Cheetah LCD board provides all the electronics necessary to drive a TFT flat panel display. It provides high-quality scaling, frame rate conversion and color depth processing to generate 16.7 million colors for six-bit TFT panels. Also based on Sage's Cheetah2 IC, the Cheetah LCD board features AutoSet, an automatic image adjustment feature that simplifies flat panel operation. AutoSet automatically calibrates the display image for size, position, phase, brightness and contrast to generate images with unmatched picture clarity.

The Market

Sage's first project was to manufacture an IC-based controller for FPDs. But due to the technical snags in the manufacturing factory, Sage lost six months. Sage compensated the loss through its second generation IC-based product, the Cheetah2. Even after its successful introduction Sage's first product was not a market winner at that time because competitor PixelWorks had introduced a slightly superior product. But sage didn't lose heart; it incorporated the views and requests of its customers in the design of Cheetah2, which was introduced in June 98 and gained its market position.

Currently over 350 million PC and TV CRTs are produced every year whereas only 25 million FPD units were produced last year. But the capacity is increasing fast and analysts predict that by the year 2006, more FPD monitors will be sold for mainstream use than standard CRT monitors and that by 2010 flat panels will be the sole display technology.

The ever-growing capacities and improved yields of flat panel manufacturing plants is a major factor in the steady decline of these screens. So the price will eventually go down.

Moreover, technical advances have allowed flat panel manufacturers to design and build larger and larger screens. The largest FPD panel that will fit in a notebook computer is 15 inches, but 20-inch panels are now becoming commonplace and 50-inch panels are being developed. The larger screens are useful for desktop PC monitors and flat panel TVs. Sage is well positioned to take advantage of these trends. The FPD panel vendors are using Sage solutions to provide low-cost electronics to deliver the type of plug and play connectivity. Sage is concurrently developing products that will enable the production of low-cost flat panels for the consumer electronics TV industry.

For New Entrepreneurs

Reddy's vision, perseverance and luck were the prime reasons for his success. An individual cannot make a company. It's the team that matters for the success of the company, says Reddy. According to him, it is more than academic credentials that make a successful entrepreneur. One need not go to a good school to succeed. As long as you have the vision and perseverance, I think, you can become a successful entrepreneur, says Reddy, for those who aspire to become an entrepreneur.

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