How many little monochrome displays do you have in your house? Lots, probably. They're on alarm clocks, the digital tuner on your radio, the bathroom scale, and the thermometer in the medicine cabinet. There's one on the control panel of your microwave, and yet another, probably, on your refrigerator or dishwasher. Don't forget the thermostat in your living room, your calculators and wristwatches, the indoor-outdoor thermometer, and your MP3 player. You'll likely find even more if you look in your briefcase or car.

For 30 years, at least, the mainstay of the market for these simple numeric and alphanumeric displays has been liquid-crystal-display technology. LCDs are cheap—a 5- by 8-centimeter display can cost a product manufacturer as little as 60 U.S. cents if bought in quantity—but they leave a lot to be desired. Without backlighting, they have poor contrast ratio and poor brightness, so they're hard to read in ambient light that's very bright or dim. With it, though, they consume too much power and are nearly unreadable in bright environments. LCDs are also rigid and difficult to make lightweight, which further inhibits their use in mobile gadgets. What manufacturers have long wanted is a display that is power-thrifty, cheap to make, and as crisp and easy to read as ink on paper, in all lighting conditions. A display like that could carve out a huge piece of the consumer market for LCDs and other low- information displays, a market valued at US $1.2 billion annually.

PHOTO: NTERA LTD.

ON TIME: Ntera's high-contrast displays, such as the one in this alarm clock, could soon replace many of the liquid-crystal displays found in homes and offices.

Now a Dublin, Ireland, company with a total of 35 employees says that after 7 years of intensive development it is about to introduce just such a product. Engineers at Ntera Ltd. are ramping up the first commercial production line to produce a technology the company calls the NanoChromics display (NCD). "I first saw the technology four or five years ago," says Nick How, a display industry veteran who joined Ntera as president in 2003. "That was the first time I had seen something stunning and different that could compete with LCDs." He expects the first products to use these displays—a thermostat and a wall clock—to hit the market in a matter of months [see photos, "Razor Sharp" and "On Time"]. After that, Ntera executives hope, the display industry will never be the same.

Though located in Europe, Ntera is something of a throwback to the glorious beginnings of Silicon Valley, when people with plenty of ideas and fervor and not much money started companies in garages and strip malls. Ntera's modest laboratory in an industrial park on the outskirts of Dublin is in a cement-block building next to a small furniture distributor. Ntera's own desks and chairs are mismatched, and the walls are unadorned. It's quite a contrast with Microsoft's lavish Ireland campus, just down the street.

In October, a visitor found Ntera's offices eerily quiet, suggesting the calm before the storm the company will unleash on the display market. Only a couple of engineers, the product manager, one executive, and a receptionist were on hand; everybody else was in Taiwan, transferring the technology to a rented production line, or elsewhere in Europe or the United States, lining up customers.