| The new venture — a cross-border spin-out involving boffins from the Universities of Dundee and Surrey — has been launched to develop radical new technologies in the burgeoning flat panel displays sector.
Such displays are already widely used around the globe in devices from mobile phones and digital cameras to home cinema.
Now the new Anglo-Scottish company — Quantum Filament Technologies (QFT), to be based in Dundee — will commercialise new advances made in Dundee and Guildford.
It emerged today that QFT has already been in talks with one major electronics manufacturer in the Far East about possible mass-market products and also some UK-based manufacturers about potential niche products, in such areas as avionics.
“The potential is absolutely huge,” QFT’s managing director, Dr Roy Clarke, told the Evening Telegraph today. “You just have to look at what the market is worth just now to see the potential.”
QFT has become the first tenant in the new Dundee University Incubator Building off Hawkhill and has been launched with six staff.
The company has been established in a £750,000 equity deal led by Perth-based Braveheart Ventures and involving Dundee business develop-ment company Amcet, Dundee University, Surrey University and the Scottish Co-investment Fund.
QFT has acquired the rights to exploit what Mr Clarke described today as “some remarkable research” by Professor Mervyn Rose of the department of electronic engineering and physics at Dundee University and Professor Ravi Silva, the director of Surrey University’s Advanced Technologies Institute.
QFT hopes to put the city back at the centre of new display technologies.
Most of the manufacture in the sector is currently carried out in Japan, Korea and China.
Dundee University’s director of research and innovation services, James Houston, said the university had always believed the technology had “great commercial potential” and was fortunate to be able to use Scottish Enterprise's Proof of Concept Scheme to lay the early foundations for this spin- out.
QFT has already landed a well-known technology entrepreneur as its chairman, Professor Peter Denyer, founder and former chairman of Vision Group PLC and Rhetorical PLC and chairman of Microemissive Displays PLC. |
