The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Rohinni CEO Matthew Gerber – Suite Interview At CES 2020

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

Rohinni CEO Matthew Gerber - Suite Interview At CES 2020 Rohinni.com

Hi folks, Chris Foss here from thechrisfossshow.com. Hey, come in here with another great podcast. We're at CES 2020. Oh my gosh, we're going to be interviewing tons of people throughout the week. So be sure to tune in, subscribe to the show for all the good stuff. I'm here at the Rohini suite over at the Mirage. This is pretty cool. And I'm with the CEO and president. How's it going, Matt? Good, Chris. How are you? Welcome. Good, good. Thanks for having us. And so you guys are going to be hosting people up here at the Mirage, at the suite? We are.

We're going to be showing people the world of mini and micro LEDs and all the cool products that we enable. All right. So give us a rundown. Let's take a look around at what you guys have and what you're doing. Mini and micro LEDs are getting a lot of press this year at CES. There have been some announcements. And the first thing we like to show people is what a mini LED really is.

Because you hear about it, you read about it, but not many people have actually seen an individual mini LED. So let me show you. We've made up these cards, and this one's for you. Okay. See that little clear section in the middle? Let me show you we've made up these cards and this one's for you. Okay What looks like a grain of salt Tiny grain of salt you can see That's about this thickness of your hair

You can see it's got two two pads at anode and cathode Pass electricity through it and that little thing lights up. Wow. Yeah. And so what Rohini is as a company, we're a bunch of irreverent, nonconformist engineers that very small, 20 people work in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. And what we really love to do is we love to solve problems that people tell us we can't solve and that makes us happier than anything else and the reason we focus on these micron scale electronics is our founders saw a mini LED about eight years ago and realized that if we could find a way to take those tiny devices and place them

accurately at a high rate of speed we could completely change the way consumer electronics look. Wow that's pretty amazing. So when we describe Rohini to people we say that we combine our vision, execution, and micron scale electronics to make impossible products possible. So come on over here let me show you what some of these things do. So you got a whole bunch of stuff that's going on here. Yep, yep and so the problem with LEDs with LEDs packaged LEDs is they're big devices So they take up a lot of space and they generate heat and they use a fair amount of power And so what we do by being able to take these micron scale devices and place them directly on substrates

They're unpackaged semiconductors, we create products that are thinner, that are brighter, and that use less power. And then the other cool thing, the thing that gets the product designers really excited, is because you can take a lot of these small devices and you could put them in a small space, you can make things animate. So if you look over here, you can see this is a typical 5-inch display size with a mini LED backlight. It's got about 2,000 mini LEDs on there. And you can see it almost looks like a display. Yeah.

Right? And right above your head here, this is just a fun example of what we could do with lighting. You see how thin that is? Yeah. That also, I believe that has about 3,000 mini LEDs. And so you can do all kinds of cool things with this technology. Now, we as a company, we're a small group of inventors and innovators. And so we knew that we needed help taking this

enabling technology to market and so we picked a few key markets and what you're gonna see in this suite here if you come by is you're gonna see products not only demo products from Rohini but you're gonna see products that are actually moving into the marketplace from our three key joint venture partners. The first joint venture we did is a company called Lumi, and that's a company that's focused on keyboard backlights and logos. The second joint venture is with a company called Magna, a very big automotive company. That joint venture is focused on automotive products like lighting and in-vehicle lighting. And then the third JV we'll show you a product from is with a company called BOE, the world's

largest display company. And that JV is going to be focused on LCD display backlighting and direct emission video walls. Okay, so let's take a look. Yeah, so come on over. Let's take a look first at what a mini-LED-based keyboard backlight looks like. And so you can see what we can do with these backlights is instead of big, bulky LEDs that are mounted on rigid circuit boards that take up a lot of space inside a laptop, we place the LEDs directly on the substrate so it saves a lot of

thickness creates a much thinner assembly it's lighter and it uses significantly less power but more importantly and what makes the laptop designers excited is what you see here we can create individualization and animation with a keyboard which is something you can't do with a keyboard today. So if you want your function keys to be red and your letter keys to be green, or if you want the keys to change color, this technology enables a whole new range

of design possibilities with keyboards and keyboard backlights. Awesome sauce. That's cool. Yeah, so coming over here, let me show you what we can do for automotive customers. Okay So these are some examples and in this case an extreme example of what This technology this mini LED technology does for applications like automotive lighting

So you can imagine a taillight. This is the degree to which you can take a taillight. We can make a taillight super thin, super power efficient, very lightweight, yet get it this animated. Yeah, so good to the other different versions here. We do these these are just examples of application of this technology in taillights. And you can see these are more traditional form factors. And you can see how it's animated. This demo will animate soon.

It takes a few seconds to animate there. Which you can see, much smoother looking light, much more consistent. That's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. Come on over. We'll show you what we announced this past couple of weeks. So this is our third joint venture. It's a company called BWI Pixie. Okay. And this joint venture was formed to take this technology and create the next generation of LCD displays and video walls. And what you see here is a couple of demos.

Let me bring it over here and show you two demos here. The larger demo is a 1.6 millimeter pitch video wall assembly. And that module, I believe, has about a million and a half LED lights. This one right here, a million and a half? Million and a half. Holy crap. And it's million and a half? A million and a half. Holy crap.

Does someone have to count that? Well, the machines count it for us. So they keep track of it. And those machines also make sure each of those pixels is placed accurately and it's in the right spot. And then to the right there, that is a 0.9 millimeter pitch. So it's an even finer pitch display. Oh, wow. 0.9 millimeter pitch so it's an even finer pitch display and the cool thing about what we're showing here is there are other video wall companies that are

showing products that are like this at CES and they scale to very large sizes we're the first company to do this on glass and doing it on glass means it will bring the costs to a point where this will be a much more affordable technology to deploy not only in commercial applications but for consumer applications as well that's awesome we saw a lot of these at Cedia right Cedia shown I think Infocom yep um yeah just crazy yep and then if you turn around you can see this is also a first so this is this is a mini led based backlight lcd 75 inch 8k tv and what's a first here is this has 10 000 dimming zones holy crap So you can see in the video what it does to picture quality contrast ratio and the brightness is amazing

Yeah, that is spectacular. I might need to test that though in my house just to make sure My wife's actually got the first one coming She's got she's got your beat That's awesome That's a wall that'll make the bee look really good, I don't know Well, that's cool, man. This is beautiful. Yep.

Wow. I can just sit and look at this thing. So you can see as, you know, 20 crazy guys and gals in the woods of Idaho that have invented a suite of technologies that enables this stuff, we're just super thrilled to be here and to be with our JV partners showing these products. Yeah, awesome sauce. This is beautiful. 8K TVs.

We're seeing more and more. I think HDMI is announcing some new 8K sort of speeds or some sort of thing. Yeah, and then I think the 8K Association's also got certification available now. So, yeah, it's getting popular. I'm going to have to buy an 8K TV and throw away the 4k tv now so there's that so uh anything more we need to see up here in you guys's booth I don't think so I just encourage everybody to come by we're we're at the top floor of the Mirage in the Skyview suite and love to to see uh see you come visit with us so what's a good way to get in touch with you guys to schedule time to come up? So Rohini, and I actually don't know. We've got the number. Hang on one sec. We'll get the numbers.

So the best way to schedule some time at the suite is to call area code 208-466. Actually, I'm sorry, 208-446-8142. Okay, and they can schedule time to come see it? Yes. Or they can contact you? What's your guys' website? www.rohini.com Okay, and be sure to come by and check these guys out.

You've got to see this AK-TV NSYNC spectacular looking. And this blows my mind. a million freakin units in there Wow and it's all glass and can I walk over and see you yeah is it literally this thin right here that's it yep yep I want to knock it off the wall back so that would be good Chris you broke her display look up thin that is guys that guys. That is just thin, thin, thin. Wow. That's nice. When do I get a TV like that? Well, I guess I don't need a TV like that.

I need a TV like that. Well, or maybe both. I'll just take both. Maybe both. I want, like, my whole house just to be water-walled TVs. So that would be good for me. It would be Blade Runner, right? It's coming.

Yeah, Blade Runner. Yeah, Blade Runner is coming. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you very much. We certainly appreciate it. And, and guys be sure to check these folks out look them up on on the web if you're not here at CS or if you here at the Mirage Hotel and you come up check it out they even have some food up

here so it's just really great food like some salmon stuff I hope you can join that's pretty much what brought me here no I'm just kidding all right guys thanks for tuning in we'll see you guys next time