Who We Are

Mary Lou Jepsen - CEO and Founder

Mary Lou  was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine for her work in creating One Laptop per Child (OLPC) where she led the engineering, architected the design of the $100 laptop and started the organization (with Nicholas Negroponte).  Wired Magazine credits her laptop architecture design with starting the low-cost laptop revolution; these low-cost laptops now comprise about 1/4 of the entire laptop market just two years after mass production commenced.    Mary Lou founded Pixel Qi Corporation in 2008  in an effort to bring OLPC's display and power management innovations to the vastly larger commercial market.  Previously, Mary Lou also co-founded MicroDisplay Corp. and served as its CTO for 8 years; served in executive management at Intel Corporation; and on the faculty at both MIT (Cambridge, MA) and RMIT (Australia).  Mary Lou earned a Ph.D. in Optics, a BSEE and a BA in Art (req.) all from Brown University as well as a MS in Holography from the MIT Media Lab.  She has won numerous awards for her contributions including  the 2011 Edwin Land Medal from the Optical Society of America, and the 2011 Anita Borg "Women of Vision" Award for Innovation. 

Grace Li – CFO

Grace came to Pixel Qi with an extensive background in investment banking and operations experience in the technology industry.  Before joining Pixel Qi, she was Director, Strategic Marketing and Business Development at InvenSense, a private hardware company.  Previously, Grace headed up the semiconductor banking practice at Needham & Company, a leading investment banking and asset management firm that specializes in advisory services for growth technology companies.  In addition, she headed up Needham’s activities relating to Asia.  Prior to joining Needham, Grace worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.  She holds a MS in Finance from Drexel University.

Dr. Carlin Vieri - VP of Engineering

Carlin Vieri joined Pixel Qi from Apple Inc. where he engineered new generation display electronics for the iPhone and other devices.  Previously he pioneered liquid crystal on silicon backplanes, drive schemes and interfaces with the MicroDisplay Corporation, where he was Director of Electronics.  He has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and  BS in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley. 

Dr. Robert Lu - Director of Liquid Crystal Engineering

Robert Lu is a virtuoso liquid crystal mode designer who spent the last decade as a senior researcher working with Shin-Tson Wu at University of Central Florida.  His inventiveness and detailed modeling of liquid crystal modes is widely lauded.  Previously he led LC engineering at Lightwaves2020, a telecom component startup.  He holds a PhD from Fudan University in China. 

John Ryan - COO and Vice President of Sales & Marketing

Previously John Ryan was a executive management consultant at the Monitor Group in Cambridge, Mass., where he advised high tech and telecom companies on structure, strategy, markets, and problem solving at board- and executive-management levels.  He has 30 years of experience in technology management and a deep understanding of electro-optics technologies.   In 1991 John founded RHK: Ryan, Hankin and Kent - the now-legendary telecom consulting and analysis company, and served as its president until it was acquired in 2005.  Prior to RHK John served in sales and marketing management roles at Coherent and Lasertron.  At age 22, John completed his PhD in Laser Physics from Imperial College, University of London.

Brian Graham – Vice President of Sales

Brian joined Pixel Qi after 16 years at Sharp where over the years he served in several executive sales positions.  Prior to moving into sales, Brian worked in applications and design Engineering in the electronics industry. Brian has an MBA from the University of Texas and a  BSEE from the University of Michigan.

Belle Fu – VP of Manufacturing

Belle joined Pixel Qi from AUO, where she managed Cell Engineering and Array Etching Engineering, and then managed business plan in the Strategic Planning Office. Previously she managed VA Cell and new technology development in QDI, and brought up the Cell factory in Prime View International (now Eink Holdings).  She is a PhD candidate in Organizational Psychology from AIU in the U.S., and has a BS in Chemical Engineering from National Taiwan University in Taiwan.

Jerry Chung – VP of Module Engineering

Jerry has held senior display engineering manager position at Apple Inc. where he managed the Cinema display development. Previously he was vice president of device engineering at SiPix Imaging, developing e-paper device model and driving schemes. Prior to his career in the display industry, Jerry worked at HP and Xerox on printing technology and developed multiple laser and inkjet printing products. Jerry has a BS in Electrical Engineering from National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and has done graduate study at University of Southern California.

Vision Statement (from January 2008)

The publishing industry is in major transition - magazines and newspapers have become too expensive to distribute via paper.   But words and reading will survive: We are on the cusp of "cloud computing". 3G wireless services, WiFi and mesh networking are widely deployed.  Ebook readers, digital photoframes, and richly-featured touch-screen phones abound.  Mini-notebook computers – netbooks – are growing rapidly in adoption. It's not just about big-iron computing anymore. 

Pixel Qi has a belief on the future of the computing - it's not about the CPU or the OS -   It is about the screen. 

New classes of thin-client devices will increasingly lack complex motherboards and operating systems.  We are already in a world of $10 CPUs, next year they will be less expensive.   We see the future of the portable electronics as simply the display - with embedded electronics eventually right in the display glass itself.  This is the future laptop, the future cell phone and the future PDA.   Instead of focusing on higher speed (more MHz) and larger memory (more GBytes), we work toward new device designs by focusing on displays that we can read, as easily as paper - indoors and out - with battery life measured in days not hours.

In our vision, new displays, with integrated touchscreens, and wireless capability are the future.  Displays on computers should not be just small televisions – although the ability to display HDTV-quality video is essential. Displays for computers need to be optimized to crisply display text, they need to be optimized for a reader just 30 centimeters from the screen; they need to allow for widespread variations in ambient lighting; they need to support lowering the overall power consumption of the entire device.

We embrace the reality that your gmail, flickr photos, chat sessions and you-tube videos are downloaded on the fly already.  Of course, some solid state memory is needed, and wireless access, but a bulky OS and bulky application software just aren't needed.  A display that includes an integrated multi-touch screen in the same layers that turn on and off the pixels of the screen means that we can have multi-touch for an incremental cost increase over the display screen itself.  Maybe for less than $1US.

The display is the most expensive component in a modern laptop, and the most power hungry, and it's uncomfortable to read when compared with paper.  We aim to fix this – our team already took the first step with the OLPC screen.  The battery is the second most expensive component in the laptop or portable.  We propose to massively lower the power consumption of the screen and thus also slash the cost of the battery and dramatically boost how long your machine can run on it before you have re-charge it.

We will do all of this while making LCD screens lower cost, higher resolution, easier to read and sunlight readable.  We've already shown the first step of this at One Laptop per Child by creating a display that is 5X the resolution, 1/3 the cost, 1/10th the power consumption.  In addition the One Laptop per Child screen is sunlight readable, and it enables one to the turn the motherboard and CPU off while the screen stays on - offering further massive power savings. We plan to take this much further. 

We aren't doing this the traditional way - we aren't planning to invent new molecules, spend 100's of millions of dollars or even billions to build brand new manufacturing facilities, hype it and then deliver maybe in 10 to 20 years.  We are embracing a practice commonly used by the Silicon integrated circuit industry.  We are designing our new screens to fit into existing LCD manufacturing processes, with existing materials, already available at the screen manufacturers in extremely high volume with excellent pricing, quality, and reliability.  Our changes are conceptual and fast.  We are devising new ways to use existing manufacturing processing to create new screens with radical new performance.  The screen in the OLPC laptop was our first example.  It went from specification to mass-production ready, fully passing all quality and reliability testing in 6 months.  6 months!  It's unheard of in the display industry. 

- Mary Lou Jepsen - Founder of Pixel Qi Jan 2008