Himax CEO comments on Head mount displays

I think these comments given during Himax's most recent conference call will be of interest. CEO is obviously in the middle of development with multiple customers, so I give the comments high regard. Note he also mentions product launches at the end of this year or early next, that may align with all of the hints being discussed here with ML.

I would also say that these comments are quite an endorsement of what Karl Guttag has been saying for months. Difficult challenges all being worked on, but no perfect solutions.

FWIW:

Tristan Gerra, Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated, Research Division - MD and Senior Research Analyst [5]

Also a quick technology question regarding the headup display you've mentioned some progress if first, you could talk about the timing and of potential ramping and what revenue opportunity and also compare it with the DLP or micromirror MOEMS technology that some competitors seems to be implementing for headset displays if you could just give us a quick overview of the differences in technology and why you think you are well positioned there?

Jordan Wu, Himax Technologies, Inc. - Founder, CEO, President and Director [6]

Firstly, quite frankly the market is slowing down. There are couple of very high profile launches, but they hit the sweet spot of the consumer's demands, if you will, and we were fortunately enough to have participated in both in fact in many others as well. So I think for us in our customers we have kind of learned from the lessons and basically they are some technology issues but more importantly are cost issues. Technology issues include the very famous field of view and certainly the weight and the size and the mechanical design, the industrial design of the wole gear(inaudible) and what not but I think the most important thing is [property]probably cost and the -- and because of this issues the developers are not particularly enthusiastic (inaudible) about developing as particularly for AS glasses and that just adds to the problem. So I think what us and our customers are working very hard to do behind the scene, if you like, is try to solve all these problems [hope] hopefully once and for all and there are -- and so you're probably not hearing like higher-- high profile or our announcing break through (inaudible) LCOS technologies again but there are actually a lot of activities going on as we speak behind the scene.

Having said though -- we do anticipate if not end of this year probably sometime next year there will still be customers trying to launch products, new products, tried to further test the market but I think again what we and the industry leaders are doing right now I believe is fair to say is that we want to sit back and really learn from lesson and really tackle the problem that we learned from the past. As far as comparison with DLP and Scanning Mirror. But Scanning Mirror involves laser and (inaudible) actually DLP as well, they are there -- as far as I (inaudible) can tell, sparkling remains the major, major issue, technical issue and it is really very, very difficult to solve. And I think and actually, I don't want to elaborate too much here DLP is never really a serious player in goggles for a lot of technological barriers, DLP is quite suitable for like strong illumination projector. But when it comes to goggles type of displays not really suitable. Some customers are starting on scanning mirror more carefully right now but again we're also hearing a lot of very difficult to solve problems and the fact that the scanning mirror has been around for very, very long time for as long as (inaudible) LCOS, and it's nothing new to goggle customers. People have been studying scanning mirror ever since we got started on this goggles business. But I haven't seen anything really concrete so far. So I think it's fair to say that the LCOS remains the leading technology, when it comes to AR devices -- AR goggle devices but the again I mean don't expect anything major this year or even next. Having said that though I mentioned briefly in my prepared remarks, HUD or head-up display, I think it's a very exciting area.