A little while ago I reported about the new IMOD display technology from Qualcomm, which should yield high quality displays that consume very low power. I saw the displays in action at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but was unimpressed. The displays shown there were small, and perhaps similar to the LCDs that displayed the time on my watch about 30 years ago. Very few graphics and no moving pictures were shown. Still, LCDs have come a long way since the seventies, so perhaps the new IMOD displays will have a bright (no pun intended) future also.

What’s the next step? High volume, low cost production facilities. Yesterday Qualcomm and Foxlink announced just that. They will jointly build a new dedicated IMOD fab in — where else — Taiwan. The fab is expected to be operational in 2009. There’s no mention of how many units the fab can produce.

Can Qualcomm, the CDMA wireless communications company, be successful at entering such a new market? Will IMOD take off?