Beeteson said he and Knox got started on their invention about five years ago while standing at the whiteboard in his office. They listed the different approaches that had been used in trying to create a flat CRT and those that had not. "When we ran the gamut of things that affect electrons," Beeteson said, it turned out that permanent magnets had not received much attention. "Then we thought of collimating beams, and we were off."
The scientists used electromagnetic simulation software to see what the computer might predict would happen when they fired electrons toward holes in a magnet. The simulations were promising. "We knew we were on to something," Knox said.
To test their idea, the scientists needed holes drilled into the dense magnets that they proposed to use. They took the material to a dentist who drilled holes in the magnet, wearing out three drills in the process.
They sprinkled iron filings to view the lines of magnetic flux, and again the results were promising, for the filings showed that the flux lines were indeed going through the holes in the magnet. "We saw filings concentrated on the edges of each hole, with a void in the middle, like a wee volcano," Knox said.
Then, Beeteson said, "there were years of hard work to get the magnetic matrix into actual practice." Rather than building a full prototype of the device, the two researchers devised a display of a few pixels, Knox said, "to make sure there were no fundamental physical reasons why it might fail."
IBM is interested in licensing the technology to others, Knox said. But don't expect the new tubes to appear soon in television sets or desktop computers. Bob O'Donnell, an analyst specializing in display technology at IDC, a market research firm in Framingham, Mass., said that a substantial lag between invention and commercialization was typical of display technology.
"This is obviously a completely novel way of building a CRT," he said of the IBM invention. "That means it will be quite a while before it's available, given the time it takes to develop and refine display technologies and to translate them into manufacturing."
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