SID receives $100,000 to create educational endowment fund

JUNE 17--The Society for Information Display (SID; San Jose, CA; www.sid.org), an international nonprofit society devoted to the advancement of display technology, manufacturing, and applications, has received a donation of $100,000 from Semiconductor Energy Laboratory Co. Ltd. (Kanagawa, Japan). Larry F. Weber, chair of SID's Honors and Awards Committee, said the donation, which was received on March 30, would be used to begin an educational endowment fund. The fund's capital will be preserved, and the interest will be used for student scholarships, student research grants, faculty research grants, and curriculum development. A new SID committee will be established to supervise the fund, Weber said, and seek new donors, large, and small.

The Society for Information Display was founded in 1964 as a technical society consisting mostly of cathode-ray-tube designers in the California avionics industry. Its membership has now grown to 6000 professionals in the global display industry, located from Osaka to Eindhoven, from Stuttgart to Nanjing. The industry produces liquid-crystal displays for products from cell phones to computer monitors and large-screen TVs, plasma display panels for public information displays and large-screen TVs, small imagers for front and rear projection displays, CRTs for monitors and television, and emerging display technologies such as organic light-emitting-diode and flexible displays. The industry's sales are estimated to reach $66 billion this year, rising to $74 billion in 2005, according to market research firm DisplaySearch, making it one of the most rapidly growing segments of the electronics industry.