RPO closing a big round to fund touch-screen production

Silicon Valley startup RPO is in the midst of closing a big round of funding to finance production of its touch screens for all sorts of displays.
Malcolm Thompson (below), chairman and chief executive of RPO, said in a panel and a subsequent interview that the funding deal is in its final stages. The company is poised to go into mass production next year on its optical touch screens, which can offer brighter and cheaper displays for phones and other devices. Speaking at DisplaySearch’s Emerging Display Technologies Conference in San Jose, Calif., Thompson said the company will use the round to launch large-scale manufacturing in China.
The company is already making prototype displays at its research and development center in Acton, Australia, where most of the company’s 20 employees work. RPO’s plastic optical waveguide technology is the key component in RPO’s new Digital Waveguide Touch products. The technology works by taking a low power light-emitting diode (LED) and distributing its light via a plastic waveguide across the surface of a display (right). When you touch the display with a finger or a pen, you interrupt the light beams. The display can detect the exact number of light beams that you interrupt, so it can tell if you’re pointing with a pen or using your index finger (below).
If you’re dialing a phone number with your finger, it knows that the keypad keys have to be large enough for you to hit them accurately. The technology doesn’t need any touch panel overlays that protect it or otherwise sandwich materials. Nothing gets in the way of the display, so it can have brighter colors than traditional resistive or capacitive touch screens.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company was founded in 2000 to focus on optical communications products, such as a plastic wave guide for optical connections between computers. But the market imploded with the dotcom crash and the company went into hibernation. A couple of engineers stayed on board to repurpose the technology. They came up with the idea for displays in 2005. Thompson joined as chairman 2.5 years ago and became CEO about 18 months ago.
I first interviewed Thompson when he was running dpiX, a Xerox Palo Alto Research Center spinoff that eventually became an X-ray medical systems company. He sold that business to a bunch of medical companies in 1999. He moved on to a communications company and then did consulting before taking the RPO job. He has focused on how to make the optical technology into a low-cost display technology. Screens vary in size from three inches to 19 inches, but Thompson says there is nothing that could stop the company from making 30-inch screens eventually.
The displays are aimed at cell phones, portable devices, cameras, game devices, and automotive navigation. In a demo, Thompson showed how the technology could quickly and accurately recognize the differences between handwriting with a pen or erasing the writing with the touch of a finger. He said that application developers can create multitouch applications with full QWERTY keyboards or create digital chalkboards. As with the iPhone screen, you can pan and zoom or use gestures to enlarge a photo.
To date, the company has raised $20 million from investors including GE Capital in Hong Kong, Japan’s JAFCO, BASF in Germany, and a couple of Australian investors. Thompson said the round would likely be double figures (more than $10 million) and could take the company to breakeven.
The toughest competition will be the existing “projected capacitance” screens that dominate the touchscreen business today. Thompson said RPO has nine patents granted and 82 applications pending.