Kopin Profile
Kopin Corporation (Kopin) operates as a developer and provider of high-performance application-specific optical solutions consisting of high-resolution microdisplays, microdisplays subassemblies and related components for defense, enterprise, industrial, and consumer products. The company’s products are used for soldier, avionic, armored vehicle, and training and simulation defense applications; industrial, public safety and medical headsets; 3D optical inspection systems; and consumer augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) wearable headsets systems.
As part of its plan to focus the company’s resources on new and existing defense, industrial and consumer applications that are in line with its strategic plan, in January 2023, it conducted a partial spinout of its organic light emitting diode (OLED) development unit to Lightning Silicon Technology, Inc. (Lightning Silicon). Lightning Silicon received a license to certain Kopin intellectual property to develop, manufacture and sell OLED technologies for use in the consumer market. The company received an equity interest in Lightning Silicon and expects to receive royalties from the sale of products related to the licenses. The company retained the ability and rights to develop, manufacture and sell OLED displays and complete optical solutions that include microdisplays to its core base in the defense and enterprise markets, as well as value added consumer applications.
The company’s strategy is to focus on providing its customers application-specific optical solutions, which sets it apart from its competition who typically only provide displays. The company offers display technologies, from its portfolio of display technologies (micro inorganic light emitting diode (MicroLED), OLED, liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS), and active-matrix liquid crystal displays (AMLCDs)) with specific optical designs, and drive electronics in a subassembly for the customer’s particular application. Typically, the company’s product offerings provide a digital image which is overlayed on the analog world.
The company’s primary sources of product revenues are from the sale of display and optical components and subassemblies for defense and industrial applications and development contracts primarily for U.S. defense programs. The company is in development to create MicroLED displays. The components the company offers for sale consist of its proprietary miniature AMLCD, LCOS, OLED, MicroLED display technologies, application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), backlights, and optical lenses. The company refers to its AMLCD as CyberDisplay, its LCOS displays/Spatial Light Modulators (SLMs) as Time Domain Imaging technology, and its OLED displays as Lightning displays. The company’s transmissive AMLCDs are designed in Westborough, Massachusetts, have initial manufacturing steps performed in Taiwan and then are completed in its facility in Westborough, Massachusetts.
The company’s AMLCD components are sold separately or in subassemblies. For example, the company offers a display as a single product, a display module, which includes a display, an optical lens and backlight contained in either plastic or metal housings, a binocular display module which has two displays, lenses and backlights, and a higher-level assembly which has additional components for defense applications. Examples of products manufactured by the company’s customers that include its AMLCD components include weapon sights and target locators for soldiers to enable faster and more accurate target acquisition; weapon sight systems that support artificial intelligence (AI) based targeting systems in land-based armored systems, light vehicles, and tanks; fighter pilot helmets that use its display to overlay information (targeting, plane operation, etc.) over the real world scene; industrial headsets for applications such as field maintenance/service where a service worker can visually access diagrams and drawings in real time while keeping both hands free to conduct work or to access a remote expert with live video to help solve a problem remotely – thereby increasing productivity and effectiveness; public safety devices, such as firefighter masks that include its displays so that a firefighter may use the thermal imager to navigate a smoke-filled building; and AR and VR consumer products for recreational use, including rifle sights.
The company’s LCOS products are designed and manufactured at its Forth Dimension Displays (FDD) subsidiary in Dalgety Bay, Scotland. The company’s LCOS displays are often configured with drive electronics and sold as a package that makes it easier for its customers to design its displays into their end products. A significant portion of the LCOS displays is sold to customers for incorporation into SLMs, which are built into manufacturing equipment that are used for 3D optical measurement.
The company’s OLED displays provide either color or monochrome images and are offered in a variety of sizes and resolutions. The company is developing color and monochrome MicroLED displays.
The AMLCD display driver ASICs the company offers are the electronic interfaces between its displays and the products into which the displays are incorporated. The optical lenses and backlights the company offers are based on either its proprietary designs or designs it licenses from third parties. The ASICs, optical lenses, and backlights are manufactured by third parties.
The company’s NVIS, Inc. (NVIS) subsidiary is a designer and manufacturer of defense and industrial head-mounted and hand-held VR products and training simulation defense equipment in Reston, Virginia. Depending on the size of the order, NVIS’s products are either manufactured in its Reston, Virginia facility or by a contract manufacturer in the U.S.A. NVIS products allow customers to visualize and interact with simulated 3D environments and equipment for training purposes. The company’s customers develop high-fidelity training and simulation applications that require high-performance visuals, intuitive controls, and unsurpassed customer support.
The focus of the company’s internally funded research and development activities is on its OLED and MircoLED display technologies. Previously the company used internally funded research and development funds to design headset systems that were focused on the emerging enterprise and consumer markets for head-worn, hands-free, voice-and gesture-controlled wireless computing and communication devices. The company continues to license its previously designed systems under agreements that may include a royalty payable to it and a purchase and supply agreement that requires it to supply its customers and its customers to buy its components for integration into their products. The licenses may convey the right of exclusivity for a particular market or geographic area.
In addition to sales of its components and subassemblies, the company derives a significant portion of its revenue from developing custom product solutions for its customers which it refers to as Funded Research and Development.
Solution
Kopin Technology
Kopin technology includes the ability to design, and in most cases, manufacture proprietary small form factor AMLCD, LCOS, OLED and MicroLED displays and optical lenses and the know-how to design and manufacture components and subassemblies based on the company’s display technologies. The company also offers proprietary backlights and ASICs that work with its AMLCD displays. The company’s components are used in its customers’ products, such as headsets for field service personnel, medical professionals, or consumer rifle scopes. The company also offers backlights and ASICs that work with its AMLCD displays. The subassemblies the company offers combine one or two of its displays, backlight, ASIC, complex optics, and other electronics in an assembly that is then included in a larger system (for example a weapon sight or a targeting system in an armored vehicle). These subassemblies must survive the shock and vibration of weapons fire and operate in extreme environmental conditions. The considerable know-how that goes into the design, materials selection, assembly, and testing of these subassemblies is an important part of the company’s technology.
Display Products
Small form factor displays used in near-eye applications are widely used in defense in many applications, such as thermal weapon sights, avionic helmets and training and simulation systems. Small form factor near-eye displays have more limited use in industrial products, such as wearable headsets that allow users to view data, schematics, and videos to enable them to perform production or repairs. The company’s small form factor displays have certain advantages with respect to small size, resolution, brightness, and low power consumption that are advantageous for product design and usage.
The company’s principal display products are miniature high-density color or monochrome AMLCDs that range from approximately 428 x 240 resolution to 2048 x 2048 (2K) resolution and are sold in either a transmissive or reflective format. The company offers emissive OLED displays with a resolution of 1280 x 720 (720p), 2048 x 2048 2K, 1280 x 960 (QVGA) and has demonstrated a 2560 x 2560 (2.6K). The company sells its displays individually or in combination with its other components assembled in a unit. For example, the company offers a display as a product, a module product unit that includes a single display, backlight and optics in a plastic housing, a binocular display module product that includes two displays, backlights and optics in a plastic housing, and a subassembly that it refers to as an HLA (Higher-Level Assembly) that contains a display, light emitting diode based illumination, optics, and electronics in a sealed housing, primarily for defense applications.
The company’s transmissive AMLCD products, which it refers to as CyberDisplay products, utilize high-quality, single-crystal-on-silicon, which is the same high-quality silicon used in conventional integrated circuits. This single-crystal-on-silicon is not grown on glass; rather, it is first formed on a silicon wafer and patterned into an integrated circuit (including the active matrix, driver circuitry and other logic circuits) at an integrated circuit foundry. These processes enable the manufacture of miniature active-matrix circuits that are comparable to higher resolution displays relative to passive and other active matrix displays that are fabricated on glass. The company’s foundry partners fabricate integrated circuits using its proprietary backplane designs for its displays in their foundries in Taiwan. The fabricated wafers are then returned to the company’s facilities, where it lifts the integrated circuits off the silicon wafers and transfer them to glass using its proprietary Wafer Engineering technology. The transferred integrated circuits are then processed, packaged with liquid crystal, and assembled into display panels at the company’s Display Manufacturing Center in Westborough, Massachusetts.
The company’s proprietary technology enables the production of transparent circuits on a transparent substrate, in contrast to conventional silicon circuits, which are on an opaque substrate. The company’s CyberDisplay products’ imaging properties are a result of the inclusion of a liquid crystal layer between the active-matrix integrated circuit glass and the transparent cover glass.
The color CyberDisplay products generate colors by using color filters with a white backlight. Color filter technology is a process in which display pixels are patterned with materials, which selectively absorb or transmit the red, green, or blue colors of light.
The company’s reflective LCOS display products are miniature high-density, dual mode color sequential/monochrome reflective microdisplays with resolutions that range from approximately 1280 x 768 pixels (WXGA) resolution to 2K resolution. These displays are manufactured by the company’s FDD subsidiary in Scotland. The company’s reflective displays are based on a proprietary, high-speed, ferroelectric liquid crystal on silicon (FLCOS) platform. The company’s digital software and logic-based drive electronics combined with the very fast switching binary liquid crystal, enables its microdisplays to process images purely digitally and create red, green, and blue gray scale in the time domain. This architecture has major advantages in visual performance over other liquid crystal, organic light-emitting diode, and microelectromechanical systems-based technologies: precisely controlled full color or monochrome gray scale is achieved on a matrix of undivided high fill factor pixels, motion artifacts are reduced to an insignificant level, and there are no sub-pixels, no moving mirrors, and no analog conversions to detract from the quality of the image.
The FLCOS device consists of two substrates. The first is a pixelated silicon-based complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) substrate which is manufactured by the company’s foundry partner based on its proprietary backplane design using conventional silicon integrated circuit lithography processes. The silicon substrate forms the display’s backplane, serving as both the active matrix to drive individual pixels and as a reflective mirror. The second substrate is a front glass plate. Between the backplane and the front glass substrate is a ferroelectric liquid crystal material which, when switched, enables the incoming illumination to be modulated.
The company’s OLED technology can emit light when electrical flows through its electroluminescent layers as opposed to its AMLCD which requires a separate light source. The company’s OLED microdisplays have a top-emitting structure built on opaque silicon integrated circuits rather than on glass. An OLED display typically has a wider viewing angle than an AMLCD. Light from an OLED appears evenly distributed in the forward directions, and so a slight movement of the eye relative to the display does not perceive the change in the image brightness or color. OLED displays can also have a much higher contrast ratio than AMLCDs, which is desirable for some user applications.
Kopin is aims to disrupt the OLED microdisplays industry with a new fabless, scalable business model. Kopin has more than 20 patents granted or pending on the design of OLED backplanes to get low power consumption, high frame rates, and more uniform display images. Kopin has established relationships with two silicon foundries to produce OLED backplane wafers.
The company’s proprietary technology in OLED microdisplays lies mainly in the design of the integrated circuits or backplane upon which OLED microdisplays are built. The backplane drives the performance of the display.
Two of the biggest challenges for the OLED microdisplays for AR and VR applications are low brightness and short lifetime. Kopin is working to solve both issues with a double OLED stack approach. Most OLED microdisplays commercially available in volume to date have been made with a single-stack OLED structure, namely consisting of a one junction organic diode structure.
The company has engaged foundry services for the fabrication of the Lightning OLED backplane wafers. The company’s model is to sell these wafers to foundries that deposit the organic material on the backplane and manufacture the displays. The deposition foundries will either sell the displays to their customers or to the company for resale to its customers.
The company has several OLED microdisplays, including a 2K display with 2048 x 2048 resolution in a 0.99 inches diagonal size, which are aimed at VR and Mixed Reality applications; and a 720p display with 1280 x 720 resolution in a 0.49 inches diagonal size, which is aimed at AR applications. The company has also demonstrated a 2.6K x 2.6K with 2560 x 2560 resolution in a 1.3 inches diagonal display, which is aimed at VR applications, and a QVGA display with 1280 x 960 resolution in a 0.5 inches diagonal size, which is aimed at electronic viewfinder and AR applications. The company’s OLED microdisplays have a combo C-PHY/D-PHY Mobile Industry Processor Interface and display stream compression to allow 120 Hz operation at the full resolution. This display is designed for high-end VR and content streaming applications.
Kopin is also exploring the development of MicroLED microdisplays which offer the possibility of high brightness, wide viewing angle, excellent contrast, and low cost. Kopin is working with other partners to explore the potential benefits and implementation of the technology. OLED displays has less brightness range but offer superior contrast and response time characteristics and therefore are better suited in an immersive products environment that blocks out ambient light.
Optical Lenses and Backlights
The company offers a variety of optical lenses, some of which it has developed internally and others for which it licenses the rights to sell. The company also offers a variety of backlights, some of which it has developed internally and some of which are off-the-shelf components. The lenses come in a variety of sizes with the smallest being the company’s Pupil, followed by its Pearl and Pancake lenses. The different sizes of lenses give the company and its customers design flexibility when creating headset systems. There is a trade-off between the lens size and the size of the perceived image to the viewer. For example, a Pearl lens will provide the viewer with an image approximately equivalent to what the viewer would see looking directly at a smartphone, whereas a Pancake lens will provide the viewer with an immersive experience. The company uses third parties to manufacture these lenses.
Headset Systems
The company licenses an industrial headset reference design, which is a complete head-worn computer that connects to the Internet wirelessly and includes an optical pod with one of its display products, a microprocessor, battery, camera, memory, and various commercially available software packages that it licenses. The company also licensed an industrial headset reference design, which is a device that attaches to a pair of safety glasses, includes an optical pod with one of its display products and a camera and is operated primarily through the use of voice. The display module or optical pod allows users to view information such as maintenance diagrams and instruction sets, Internet data, emails, text messages, maps or other data at a normal size because of the company’s specialized optics. The company’s industrial headsets provide the capability of viewing technical diagrams, by enabling the user to zoom in to see finer details or zoom out to see a larger perspective. The company is also developing a headset for the medical market.
Strategy
The company’s product strategy is to enter Funded Research and Development programs with U.S. defense prime contractors to invent, develop, manufacture, and sell (or license) leading-edge critical technology and microdisplays components and subassemblies that will be used in rugged environments. The company intends to use the know-how gained and technology developed from these defense development programs and products to create products that can be used in industrial, enterprise, medical and ultimately consumer applications. The products the company develops typically include a microdisplay, optics, and an ASIC in a sealed housing. The products the company makes for the defense market must be able to withstand the extreme shock and vibration experienced in weapons fire. The critical elements of the company’s strategy are to broad portfolio of intellectual property; maintain its technological leadership in defense and industrial markets; understand its customer needs; and internally manufactured products and use of third-party manufacturing.
Markets and Customers
The company’s business model is to primarily generate product revenues by selling display components and subassemblies to customers who offer defense, industrial or consumer products and to a lesser extent license its system designs and know-how. The company also enters development contracts from customers to either design custom products for them or help them integrate its technology into their products (Funded Research and Development).
The company sells its display products to its customers in various configurations including but not limited to a single display component, a module that includes a display, optic, backlight and focus mechanism and electronics, a binocular display module that includes two displays, lenses, and backlights, and as HLAs for defense customers. A HLA is similar to a module but includes additional components, such as an eye cup specific to a defense application.
The company has sold its AMLCD products to Collins Aerospace, Elbit, and DRS RSTA Inc. for use in defense applications, to RealWear and Iristik for enterprise wearable products, and to Scott Safety for public safety applications. The company has sold its LCOS display products to Saki, Jutze and Mirtec for use in 3D metrology equipment. The company’s revenues from its OLED displays have primarily been from development contracts with customers that are designing its displays into their products.
For its AMLCD display products to function properly in their intended applications, ASICs and backlights are generally required. Several companies have designed ASICs to work with the company’s display products and its customers can procure these chip sets directly from the manufacturer or through it. For fiscal year 2022, Collins Aerospace and DRS Network & Imaging Systems LLC accounted for approximately 28% and 40% of the company’s revenues, respectively.
Product Development
The company’s primary development efforts are focused on AMLCD display subassemblies for defense and industrial applications and OLED display components for defense, industrial and consumer applications.
Component Products and Subassemblies
The company offers components, such as its optical lenses, backlights and ASICs, manufactured to the company’s specifications, which the company then buys and resells. The components, which are made to order include either intellectual property the company developed or that it license from third parties.
Research and Development
The company’s revenues attributable to research and development contracts for fiscal year 2022, totaled $14.4 million.
Government Regulations
The company is subject to federal International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) laws, which regulate the protection (Cybersecurity) and export of technical data and export of products to other nations that may use such data or products for defense purposes.
History
Kopin Corporation was founded in 1984. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 1984.
