KOPN Company Profile

The components that we offered for sale in 2017 consisted of our proprietary miniature active-matrix liquid crystal displays ("AMLCD"), liquid crystal on silicon ("LCOS") displays / Spatial Light Modulators ("SLMs"), organic light emitting diode ("OLED") displays, application specific integrated circuits ("ASICs"), backlights, optical lenses and audio integrated circuits ("IC"). We refer to our AMLCD as “CyberDisplay®”, or LCOS displays/SLMs as “Time Domain ImagingTM technology”, our OLED as “Lightning™ Displays” and our audio IC as “Whisper® Chip". Our transmissive AMLCDs are designed in Westborough, Massachusetts, U.S.A., have initial manufacturing steps performed in Asia and then are completed in our facilities in Westborough, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Our reflective LCOS micro-displays are designed in Dalgety Bay, Scotland, U.K., have initial manufacturing steps performed in Asia and are completed in our facilities in Dalgety Bay, Scotland, U.K. Our OLED displays are designed in our San Jose, California, U.S.A. facilities and have initial manufacturing steps performed in Asia and then are completed by us in our facilities in Westborough, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Our displays provide either color or monochrome images and are offered in a variety of sizes and resolutions. The display driver ASICs we offer are designed in our San Jose, California, U.S.A. facilities and are the electronic interfaces between our displays and the product into which the displays are incorporated. The optical lenses and backlights we offer are based on either our proprietary designs or designs we license from third parties. Our licensed optical lenses are subject to agreements that have termination dates and are therefore subject to renewals. Our audio technologies are developed internally at our San Jose, California audio lab. The Whisper Chip, ASICs, optical lenses, and backlights are manufactured by third parties based on our purchase orders.

Our components are sold separately or in various levels of integration. For example, we offer a display module which includes 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 military applications. Current products which include our components are augmented reality consumer wearable devices for sports and fitness and virtual reality consumer products for recreational and sport drones; military devices such as thermal weapon sights and fighter pilot helmets; and industrial and public safety devices such as fire fighter thermal camera enabled masks. Our reflective display products are also configured as SLMs and are used in industrial equipment for 3D optical inspection. We have sold our AMLCD products to Rockwell Collins, Elbit Systems, Raytheon Company, DRS RSTA Inc., BAE Systems (directly and through a third party QiOptiq), and ITT for use in military applications, to Scotts Safety for public safety applications, to Google for enterprise wearable products, and to Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. ("Samsung"), Nikon Corporation (“Nikon”) and Olympus Corporation ("Olympus") for digital still cameras. Our OLED display was first introduced in 2017 and our sales of OLED displays in 2017 have primarily been for sample purposes or customer development programs.

We have designed and offered systems that are focused on the emerging enterprise and consumer markets for head-worn, hands-free voice and gesture controlled wireless computing and communication devices. Our systems connect via Bluetooth or WiFi to a smartphone or similar device in order to access or transmit information from or to the Internet or devices that are in close proximity. A feature of our enterprise systems is the ability to contact a resource, referred to as the “Remote Expert”, who can help in resolving problems. The system user and the Remote Expert can be in different locations so while the system user may be in a hazardous location the Remote Expert may be in a relatively safe location. This allows companies that purchase enterprise systems the ability to leverage their in-house experts to the technicians in the field. We currently license our systems under agreements which may include a royalty payable to us and a purchase and supply agreement which requires our customer to buy our components for the system. These systems include our components and a variety of commercially available software packages and our proprietary software. Our business model is to license our concept systems or technologies to branded OEM customers who wish to develop and market head-worn products for both mobile enterprise and consumer applications.

The introduction and wide acceptance of the smart-phone has generated advances in many technologies including smaller and cheaper electronic components, voice search engines and wireless 4G networks. Smart phone adoption has also been the catalyst for the development of software for a wide-range of applications. Leveraging off of these advances and the growth of cloud computing, a new category of “wearable” products, Smart Headsets, is emerging that provides access to data and these Apps, with some Smart Headsets including the use of voice activated hands-free technology. This emerging category of Wearable Systems can be used for hundreds of different applications by enterprise workers, public safety officials and consumers, bringing ever-increasing productivity, fun and convenience. Through the use of Smart Headsets both workers and consumers can have access to their digital files, the Internet, phone, e-mail etc., enabling an “always connected” work-style and lifestyle. We believe that advances in wearables will continue to make the “always connected” life increasingly convenient and more productive by providing easier access to and control of the information accessible through our electronic devices.

Wearable products also include body-worn devices such as sensors, scanners and terminals which are sold to enterprise markets to improve worker productivity and the consumer market to monitor health and fitness metrics such as heart rate, speed and temperature. The user interface for these devices is typically either a key pad or a touch-screen. Some Wearable products include voice recognition software as an additional feature to allow the user to navigate the device’s interface “hands-free” instead of using a traditional mouse, touch-screen or keypad. We believe wireless smartphone makers are looking to create products that work as a complement to the smartphone or to eventually replace the smartphone with more convenient configurations. Wireless network companies are encouraging the development of more products that utilize their network capacity and other companies are developing products which provide continuous access to social media outlets. In order for the markets for these new products to develop and grow, devices must further advance and application software that exploits the devices new features and functions must be developed. Device improvements include smaller, higher resolution displays, lower power processors, longer-life batteries, compact optics and software including voice recognition and noise cancellation.

Kopin Wearable Technology

Kopin Wearable technology includes component technologies which can be integrated to create headset systems. The components we offer for sale primarily consist of our displays, backlights, ASICs, optical lenses and our audio IC, Whisper Chip. In addition, we offer headset system products such as Solos smart glasses for the health and fitness market, Golden-i for the enterprise market and a visor for training and simulation.

Display Products

Small form factor displays are used in military, consumer, and industrial products such as thermal weapon sights, safety equipment, virtual and augmented reality gaming, training and simulation products and metrology tools. In order for these markets to develop and grow, advances and investment in application software, optics and wireless communications systems with greater bandwidth and increased functionality will be necessary. We believe small form factor displays will be a critical component in the development of these markets as these systems must provide high resolution images without compromising the portability of the product.

There are several micro-display technologies commercially available including transmissive, reflective and emissive. We believe we are the only company that offers all of these technologies. Our principal display products are miniature high density color or monochrome Active Matrix Liquid Crystal Displays ("AMLCDs") with resolutions that range from approximately 320 x 240 resolution to 2048 x 1536 resolution and are sold in either a transmissive or reflective format. In 2017 we introduced an emissive OLED display with a resolution of 2048 x 2048. We sell our displays individually or in combination with our other components assembled in a unit. For example, we sell a module unit that includes a single display, backlight and optics in a plastic housing, a binocular display module unit that includes two displays, backlights and optics in a plastic housing, and a Higher-Level Assembly ("HLA") that contains a display, light emitting diode based illumination, optics, and electronics in a sealed housing, primarily for military applications.

Our transmissive display products, which we refer 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 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) in 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. Our foundry partners fabricate integrated circuits for our CyberDisplay displays in their foundries in Taiwan. The fabricated wafers are then returned to our facilities, where we lift the integrated circuits off the silicon wafers and transfer them to glass using our proprietary Wafer Engineering technology. The transferred integrated circuits are then processed, packaged with liquid crystal and assembled into display panels at our Display Manufacturing Center in Westborough, Massachusetts.

Our proprietary technology enables the production of transparent circuits on a transparent substrate, in contrast to conventional silicon circuits, which are on an opaque substrate. Our 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. We believe our manufacturing process offers several advantages over conventional active matrix LCD manufacturing approaches with regard to small form factor displays, including:

Greater miniaturization;

Higher pixel density;

Full color capability;

Lower power consumption; and

Higher brightness

The color CyberDisplay products we sell 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.

For military applications which use our CyberDisplayTM®, the display is fabricated, tested and incorporated into a Higher Level Assembly ("HLA"). We offer a variety of models with varying levels of complexity but common to all models is our display, illuminations source, optics and electronics in a sealed unit.

Our reflective LCOS display products are miniature high density, dual mode color sequential/monochrome reflective micro displays with resolutions which range from approximately 1280 x 720 pixels ("720P") resolution to 2048 x 1536 pixels ("QXGA") resolution. These displays are manufactured at our facility in Scotland, U.K. Our reflective displays are based on a proprietary, very high-speed, ferroelectric liquid crystal on silicon ("FLCOS") platform. Our digital software and logic based drive electronics combined with the very fast switching binary liquid crystal enables our micro display 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 MEMS 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 is comprised of two substrates. The first is a pixelated silicon-based CMOS substrate which is manufactured by our foundry partner using conventional silicon integrated circuit lithography processes. The silicon substrate forms the displays 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.

We refer to our emissive organic light emitting diode ("OLED") microdisplays as Lightning™ products. An OLED has the ability to emit light when an electrical current is flowing through its electroluminescent layers as opposed to our AMLCD which requires a separate light source. Our OLED displays have a top-emitting structure built on opaque silicon integrated circuits rather than on glass. Light from an OLED appears fairly evenly distributed in the forward directions and so a slight movement of the eye does not perceive the change in the image brightness or color, and therefore an OLED typically has a wider viewing angle than an AMLCD.

Our proprietary technology is in the design of the integrated circuits or “back plane”. We have engaged foundry services for the fabrication of the Lightning OLED displays. We believe this outsourcing model allows us to leverage existing infrastructure to obtain lower cost manufacturing and avail ourselves of manufacturing technology improvements as they occur.

Kopin demonstrated the Lightning OLED displays with 2048 x 2048 resolution (called 2k x 2k display) at the Consumer Electronics Show 2017. The 2k x 2k Lightning display addresses the most challenging technical hurdles with virtual reality systems, including the visible “screen door” effect, which is due to insufficient display resolution, bulky size, and nausea or dizziness from motion-to-photon latency, as well as heat-build-up caused by high power consumption. We combine the one-inch diagonal Lightning OLED microdisplay (which is less than 1/10 the size of direct view displays for the same resolution) with our patented Pancake™ optics (< 20 mm thick) to enable system manufacturers to create much smaller and thinner mobile VR systems. The Lightning OLED microdisplay has almost zero latency (about 10 microseconds) and an industry leading 120-Hz frame rate. At the same time, Lightning’s distinctive design enables low power consumption, even at 120-Hz.

By offering transmissive, reflective and emissive microdisplay technologies, Kopin can uniquely support whichever technology is best suited for a given application. Transmissive and reflective AMLCD are typically used in bright light conditions as their brightness can be modulated over a wide range by controlling the backlight operation. OLED technology displays currently have less brightness range, but offer superior contrast and response time characteristics and are better suited in an immersive products environment that blocks out the ambient light.

Optical Lenses and Backlights

We offer a variety of optical lenses some of which we have developed internally and others we license the rights to sell the lenses. We also offer a variety of backlights, some of which we have developed internally and some of which are “off-the-shelf” components. The lenses come in a variety of sizes with the smallest being our Pupil, followed by our Pearl, Prism, Pantile, and Pancake lenses. The different sizes of lenses give us and our 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 at a smartphone, whereas a Prism lens will provide the viewer with an image approximately equivalent to what the viewer would see looking at a tablet. A Pearl lens, however, is smaller than a Prism and would enable a more fashionable design. Therefore, a customer designing a consumer-oriented product may choose a Pearl lens but a customer designing an enterprise-oriented product might choose a Prism Lens. We use third parties to manufacture these lenses.

Whisper Chip

Today, many devices are equipped to use voice as an input or control method for the device. Most users find, however, that today’s speech recognition on their devices is not satisfactory because it does not work reliably in the variety of noisy environments we find ourselves in during the course of our days. The root cause of the low reliability is that the noise canceling software used in today’s devices is not always effective. The Whisper Chip addresses this problem. It is designed to enhance the performance of existing audio systems and speech recognition engines by allowing the speaker’s voice to be clearly “heard” by the listener, whether the “listener” is a person or a machine. The Whisper Chip incorporates our Voice Extraction™ Filter ("VEF"). VEF is a patented approach to singulating the voice signal without distorting it. The Whisper Chip is an all-digital solution that runs at 16MHz, consumes less than 12mW of power and replaces the CODEC so no ADC or DAC is needed. The Whisper Chip is 4 x 4 mm in size and accepts up to four (4) digital microphone inputs. We use third parties to manufacture the Whisper Chip.

Headset Systems

Our headset systems include:

Consumer-oriented reference headsets that resemble typical eyeglasses but include voice and audio capabilities allowing the user to communicate with other users;

Augmented reality health and fitness sunglasses, called Solos Smart glasses, that have voice and audio capabilities, a Pupil display module which overlays situational information on the glasses;

Industrial headset reference design, called Golden-i, which is essentially a complete head-worn computer that includes an optical pod with one of our display products, a microprocessor, battery, camera, memory and various commercially available software packages that we license; and

Training and simulation head-mounted display with a 1280x1024 full color display with either a 50° diagonal field-of-view in see-through or immersive modes or a stereoscopic 60° diagonal field-of-view, built-in microphone and stereo headphones for professional augmented and virtual reality applications.

Our headsets receive or transmit data from or to the Internet by interfacing with a smartphone or similar device via WiFi or Bluetooth. They can also receive information from devices in close proximity using ANT+. The display module or optical pod allows users to view the information such as Internet data, emails, text messages, maps or biometric data (heart rate), and situational data (speed, distance traveled, watts produced) at a “normal” size because of our specialized optics. Our industrial headset Golden-i provides 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. Our headsets utilize operating system software we developed or outsource.

We believe Kopin’s wearable technology will enable easier and more convenient access to the content individuals carry in their smartphones or “in the cloud” and will be embraced by both consumers and commercial users. For commercial users, we believe increased productivity, safety and improved manufacturing quality through more efficient issue resolution and improved communication will drive adoption. Kopin Wearable reference designs are targeted for markets where the user needs a much greater range of functionality than is typically provided by wireless devices such as handsets, smartphones, tablets or Bluetooth headsets and either due to the requirements of their usage patterns, occupation, or for improved productivity the user is better served with a hands-free display system with voice recognition as the primary interface as opposed to a touchscreen or keyboard.