The School of Engineering is proud to house the second State Key Laboratory at HKUST. The new facility, which was officially opened in September 2013, will lead research into advanced displays and optoelectronics technologies. Prof Hoi-Sing Kwok, Chair Professor of Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Dr William M W Mong Chair Professor of Nanotechnology, has been appointed Director of SKL. The establishment of this prestigious laboratory is testament to the pioneering work done by the ECE Department under Prof Kwok’s leadership in the field of display technology. But talk with the professor about his work in this area, and he confesses that he “stumbled” into display technology shortly after his return to Hong Kong from 23 years of study, teaching and research in the US. His primary interest while on the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo for 13 years was in optics and electronics. “I was working on different combinations of optics and electronics and material science,” he recalls. “When I returned to Hong Kong I thought I should do something more practical, and considered integrating microelectronics and optics as HKUST had good microelectronics facilities. I was thinking of doing research into programmable holography. Then by chance I met a friend for tea, who was the founder of a successful LCD company in Hong Kong, and he asked me why not integrate microelectronics and optics in the form of display, as in having an entire display system on a single piece of silicon.” When he looked more deeply into it, Prof Kwok realized that this was indeed a “hot area”, with the likes of industry giants IBM, Sony and Intel all working on it, and is a technology that people encounter in everyday life. He was also struck by the fact that display technology is a very practical field and therefore not a research area usually covered by universities. “It was not considered scientific enough, it’s very commercially oriented,” he comments. So he set about building on Hong Kong’s expertise in microelectronics and applied for funding to set up an LCD line for the University, something he says would probably not have been possible in the US because it is much commercialized. He convinced the Hong Kong government to provide HK$15 million in funding, and his friend played a role with HK$1 million matching funds. Prof Kwok’s first project focused on the invention of liquid-crystal display on silicon (LCOS), which involved the successful integration of LCD and silicon-wafer integrated circuits (IC). “We developed one of the best micro-LCOS,” he notes. “Applications include highdefinition TV, projection TV and wearabledisplay goggles.” This technology has since been licensed to a Taiwanese company. Next came the photo-aligning technique for LCD applications, for which Prof Kwok recruited the world’s foremost expert in this field, Prof Vladimir Chigrinov. “The team is working with a Japanese company on this technology, which uses light rather than mechanical rubbing to align liquid crystals; it achieves better uniformity and doesn’t produce waste and dust. We are hopeful that this technique will be commercialized in time.” A third project has pioneered the development of low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) thin-film transistors (TFT). “This is the backbone of all high-resolution displays on glass,” he says. “We have invented a whole series of patents related to this technology, and we are also trying to commercialize it.” Display-Related Hub The SKL was set up in collaboration with Sun Yat-Sen University following approval from the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Central Government. With a grant of HK$5 million per year and matching funds from HKUST, it is initially focusing on five areas of research: oxide The establishment of the State Key Laboratory on Advanced Displays and Optoelectronics Technologies (SKL) pays tribute to the excellence demonstrated by the School in these fields and the groundbreaking work of Prof Hoi-Sing Kwok Displaying Exper 3 IN FOCUS
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