Clairvoyante

Clairvoyante is a venture-backed company that develops and licenses its PenTile® technology to flat-panel display manufacturers and their IC suppliers to improve the brightness, resolution, contrast, and power consumption of flat-panel displays.

Clairvoyante was founded in July 2000 by Candice H. Brown Elliott and Chris Thollaug. Ms. Brown Elliott theorized that display performance could be significantly improved by capitalizing on the principals of human color perception, which led her to develop PenTile® subpixel layouts and related image-processing algorithms. Clairvoyante is led by CEO Joel Pollack, formerly a senior executive with Sharp Microelectronics of the Americas.

Clairvoyante is an intellectual property company—it does not manufacture displays. The company has developed a substantial body of foundational IP for displays that includes novel subpixel layouts and the software for subpixel rendering, gamut mapping, dithering, resolution enhancement, gamma processing and metamer processing. Portfolio strategy is directed by Stuart Kaler, Clairvoyante’s general counsel. In the U.S., Clairvoyante has filed over 80 patents, with more than 20 issued or allowed. Internationally, Clairvoyante has filed nearly 500 utility and design patent applications, nearly 300 of which are issued or allowed.