Obligatory forward-looking statement. We pause appropriately, and then we move on. So Kopin Corporation makes full U.S. color televisions the size of your pinky nail. We developed this technology in the early 1990s with the funding from DARPA, which is the advanced research arm of the United States military. And it goes in a variety of different applications, both defense, industrial, and consumer. We are the market leader. We are the only real U.S.-based micro-display manufacturer. And as you'll see through the presentation, we have a lot of strong tailwinds behind us. We've had a fairly impressive growth of the company in the last year. We have a new CEO, Michael Murray, who's come on board in 2023 and refocused the company. And I think you'll see a lot of that in the presentation in a minute. Okay, just checking the slides.
So what you'll see is that we have tier one. We are a prime supplier to tier one defense companies. These are a few that are listed on the left. Of course, we also serve other folks like Raytheon, BAE, DRS, Elbit, so on and so forth. And our displays are used in a variety of applications, which I'll get into in a second. But one of the tailwinds that we have is that historically our displays are monochrome green. And the U.S. military now wants to go to full color. So there's a complete refresh cycle going on with our products. You'll also see that we have new display technologies, which are also resulting in a technology refresh from the U.S. government. And we are getting joint funding with the U.S. government to develop these programs, indicating that there's actually a home for them, that this isn't speculative R&D.
I will eventually get into our most recent display, which is actually an AI-enabled display that you look at, and it looks back at you. In 2023, we started getting a good boost as there was a real push because of the events that are going on in the world in Ukraine, the Middle East, and so on. It started with President Trump's 2016 victory pushing NATO for 2% spending, which is a requirement to be a member of NATO. Most of the nations, other than the United States, were below that. As a result of the events that have occurred over the last eight years, most of the countries are stepping up. You have countries like Poland, for instance, which are exceeding it.
Most recently, last week, President Trump said that President-elect Trump said that he really thought that we should be going to 5% of GDP to be a member of NATO. Some European nations are for it. Some are against it. I think it depends on your proximity to Russia as to where you fall out on that scale. In any event, it's clear that there is a push to increase defense spending around the world. We are receiving inquiries from countries like Korea and Japan and Europe that, frankly, we've never in our 25 years of doing defense had any contact with. Clearly, this is, for good or bad, it is a growth industry. As you can see in the most recent confirmation hearings, there is a push to increase defense spending both here and abroad. What do we make?
The building block of our products is, as I said, a full U.S. color television the size of your pinky nail. But it's made in a completely different fashion than, for instance, what you're looking at on your laptop computer, although the concept is the same. The legacy product that we have is an AMLCD, again, like your laptop computer. You shine a light through it, and you get an image. What we do is we send a silicon-on-insulator wafer, TSMC, in Taiwan. They lay out standard CMOS circuitry. It comes back to the United States. And we remove that circuitry as a thin film. And we believe we're the only company in the world that can do that. And so what you do is you take that thin film and you put it on glass. You put some liquid crystal material in it.
You put another piece of glass. You've got a glass sandwich, and then you shine light through it, and what happens is that in this CMOS circuitry, it's a series of rows and columns, and at the intersection of every row and column is a transistor, and when that transistor gets an electrical charge, the molecules align, essentially creating a light valve, and so you get these pixels. You get light through it. That's your pixel. That's your dots. That's your image. To give you an idea of our technology, your standard iPhone has somewhere between 500 and 600 pixels per square inch. Our displays, for instance, our 2K by 2K, has 4 million pixels per square inch, incredibly high resolution, and so that's what, as I said, that's what we can do and other folks can't. Now, that was our original technology.
We have since introduced organic light-emitting diode technology, which has been around for about 20 years, but we couldn't really see an application for it, but with the introduction of virtual reality, we saw a possibility for OLEDs, and so we've been developing these organic light-emitting diode technologies, and we have extremely bright OLEDs. We also have what's called a ferroelectric liquid crystal on silicon display, and then we have our most recent display, which is a micro-LED, so if you can think about, I don't know if you watched the Dallas Cowboys, but if you can think about their stadium, they had this huge 150-foot-long LCD screen. We're essentially taking that LCD screen and we're squeezing it down to an inch, 1.3-inch diagonal format. We believe we're the only company in the world that provides all four display technologies, and what that means is that we're agnostic.
Customers come to us, and they say, "Hey, I'm trying to do this. I'm trying to do that," because each display has its pros and cons. So for instance, the AMLCD has collimated light. It's very good for a thermal weapon sight on a rifle. OLED has a very wide field of view, excellent for a VR application that you're wearing in a goggle format. The ferroelectric has incredibly high switching speeds. And so you can use it in moving vehicles. And then the micro-LED, in theory, has the combination of all of them. It is a nascent technology. It's under development. It's still several years away from being commercially available because of price point. We can provide it today for high-end applications, but for general consumer electronics, it's not there yet.
It is the technology that we understand that the Apple and the Metas of the world want for their applications. So these are the applications that we're currently using them in. We use the AMLCD today in scopes, thermal weapon scopes for soldiers. It's used in the rotary wing and fixed-wing aircraft. We're migrating these to OLEDs, and ultimately they will migrate to micro-LEDs. And then we have some other applications that we use our technology in for like 3D AOI, which is optical inspection, automated optical inspection. All right. We make our displays in one of three locations, one of two locations. Excuse me. We either make them in Westborough or in Dalgety Bay, Scotland. And we do assembly in Reston, Virginia. We also do assembly in Westborough. All right. We have in Westborough a 7,400 sq ft Class I cleanroom,
I'll explain why that's very important on the next slide. Because not only do we sell the display, and you can buy this display from Sony. You can sell the displays from Samsung. You can buy, excuse me, from Sony or Samsung. We believe we're the only folks that give you the optics with it. What happens is if you take our small display and you put a magnifying lens over it, you get a very large image. It's a very simple concept. Small display, magnifying image. You get a big image. The issue is that anything that gets between the magnifying lens and the display, like a dust particle, also gets magnified. That's why we have to do this in our Class I cleanroom. We take our display and we include it in an application-specific optical assembly.
For instance, this is another one of our products. I'm holding up the eyepiece for a thermal weapon sight, the FWS-I, where we will provide the electronics, seven different lenses, all in a hermetically sealed housing that is ruggedized to withstand the shock and vibe of a .50 cal machine gun going off. And so that takes a lot of manufacturing expertise to be able to create this and not get a dust particle or something that's called FOD, floating object debris, in between the lenses. And/or when you're shaking and vibing this thing, that you might have, for instance, a little shard from one of the lens edges breaks loose. Now, all of a sudden, that's in the optical path and creating a problem. The housing might have a little piece of plastic that might break off. All of that has to be engineered out.
It's a tremendous challenge. And so that's what we provide. We provide not just the display, but the entire application-specific optical assembly. And we'll go through the programs in a minute, but it's important to understand we are sole source on all our programs. And in some cases, they don't even go out to bid because we're the only folks that can provide the technology. All right. So what do we actually provide the soldier, the war fighter? So in the middle is a typical application that you see. They're in a war fighting zone. They bring up their optic that's on their weapon, their M1 rifle, and they get the blue reticle. That's what they historically typically have. When they engage our technology, we have a ballistic calculator that works with it.
There's about a dozen different characteristics, excuse me, criteria that can affect the trajectory of a bullet. Heat, humidity, wind speed, curvature of the earth, et cetera. All that's computed. Then the soldier's looking into the eyepiece. All that information is displayed to them. Then a red reticle appears. That tells them where the actual target is because now they can see through smoke and fire and debris. Had they fired through the blue reticle, they're going to miss by a mile. Now what they do is they bring the red reticle and the blue reticle together, and you're going to hit the target. A lot of that actually is not just to improve lethality, but it's to reduce casualties of innocent people. When you're trying to win the hearts and minds of a country, stray bullets are a bad thing.
And so it's not just strictly to improve. It is to improve the productivity and accuracy of the soldier. Now, if you look over on the right, you'll see that's the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. And we provide the same information to that fighter pilot. So when they look through the canopy of the plane, on their visor, seeming to be floating in the air, is critical flight information, targeting information, so on and so forth. And we provide all that information through our display technology. And again, we are the sole provider. And on the other side, you see where that's in a rotary aircraft pilot helmet. So the next thing. Ooh, there it is. So now, using the example of the F-35 pilot who's looking out the canopy of the plane, all of a sudden, they get a warning that they're about to be engaged.
And so what typically happens is your body goes into fight or flight mode. Your adrenaline goes up, and your pupils dilate. Well, we have our display technology shining light into your eyes. So the question is, all right, now what happens? Because your pupils dilated, more light is getting into your eyes. And what the pilots do today is they flip the visor up. So that $400,000 helmet that they're all wearing, providing all this critical information, they're not looking at it anymore. And so what we've done. Oops, I guess it's not going to work, is it? Well, unfortunately, it's not working. It's frozen. Well, now we can't do it either. Let me try this. Yeah, that should play. That's a video. It's not working. It worked before. So the point is, what typically happens is in a display, you have every pixel has four quad pixels.
And that's how you get color. It has red, green, blue, blue, typically. What we've done is we removed one of the blue, and we've put in a sensor. So now our display is looking back at the eye. And so we can see what's happening to the pilot's pupil. We can see where the pilot is looking at. And so therefore, you can actually control certain operations with the eye, and you can adjust the application with that eye. And so we've had a great deal of interest in this technology from folks like Apple and Meta and some other folks. And we are working on developing this technology as we speak. So the next slide is the applications of our technologies. So on the left-hand side, you'll see, as I mentioned, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. We're in the FWS-I.
We've shipped tens of thousands of those units recently over the last couple of years. IWS-LR, another, these are all thermal imaging systems. Rotary aircraft, we announced a couple of days ago, another follow-on order. We're in the Abrams tank upgrade, so we're going to be providing four targeting mechanisms to the tank. The price is somewhere between $10-15 thousand per unit, so you can get somewhere around $40-60 thousand. And we expect there's a couple thousand tanks that potentially will be upgraded, so that's a large $100 million application for us. We are in the F-35. We've been given projections for the F-35 from the government up through 2027. That plane, by the way, will be in production, they believe, until 2030, and it'll be flying till 2070, so these are long annuity programs that we are in.
We are designed in. Requalification is very expensive, so we have a great deal of stickiness, and then there is another program that we are working on, and it's called IVAS. IVAS is a program that was run by Microsoft. They were not successful. They've withdrawn from the program. It's a multi-billion-dollar program, and so we are working with a number of companies on coming up with a solution to be part of that IVAS program. And this, again, could be several hundred million dollars to us. And we announced, I think this morning, we're going to be at the SHOT Show working with a company called Wilcox, where we'll be demonstrating some precursors to products that we believe could be useful for the IVAS program. And then finally, we have medical, so we've recently introduced a product this year called the CR-3.
Today, a surgeon, when they go in, looks up at a large screen TV and the patients below them that they're working on. This allows them to magnify into a particular area where they're doing the work. If you're doing a multi-hour surgery, the surgeon's neck starts to get tired. If you've ever driven a car, your hands follow your eyes. To the extent the surgeon moves, the hands tend to move. What we've done is come up with this head-mounted device, which the surgeon no longer has to look up. They're looking down at the patient. It's almost like a bifocal-type situation where they just have to glance up with their eyes to see the magnified image.
But they can also have complete situational awareness of what's happening to the patient as opposed to looking up at the ceiling, and they don't know really what's going on. The AMA has determined that if the doctor's looking at the patient, that's a good thing. Brilliant study. So in any event, we have introduced that this year. Our partner on that is a company called HMDmd, and it's in the market right now being tested. And they've hooked up with a large medical device company that will ultimately market it. All right. And then finally, I mentioned this micro-LED that we're working on. So just to give you an idea, you're all familiar with LED lights. And so the idea here is you actually take an LED light and you bond it to the backplane. So the backplane is the intelligence of the display. That's really our core competency.
We design these backplanes, and then we have them outsourced in the manufacturing process. But the tricky part here is that in a one-inch display, there are 16 million connections that have to be made to light up all those LEDs on it. So it's really kind of interesting. In our OLED, our AMLCD, our ferroelectric, those are all chemistry problems. This is a mechanical issue. Because you've already got the LED, you've got the backplane. The two of them work. You just got to bond them together. But it's tricky. But in any event, as I mentioned, the folks like Apple and Meta and so on believe that this is really the ultimate display that they would love to be able to go to market with a real virtual reality product. And so we're working with a number of folks on developing this technology.
Where are you working with other folks? I mean, obviously, we know you guys. And you all bought some cool technology. You're super small. You need working capital to build up the DOD business. You have this stupid mitigation BS going on. You have to raise some capital to do that. How do you have the capital to sort of do everything you want to do? How should I think how you're going to manage? So it's an excellent question. How do we have the capital to execute on a micro-LED or a Neural Display technology? And the answer is we don't. We don't have the capital to do it. And so we're working with partners. And so there's a thought there that maybe we license out the consumer rights and we keep the military rights and so on and so forth.
And that's what we're working on the last year and a half, bringing in interested parties to help develop the technology. I mean, if you look at my second or third slide up there, you'll see that there's a little footnote on the NeuralDisplay, for instance, that says, "Pending third-party funding." So, all right. We did get funded by the DOD for the first micro-LED. So we do have micro-LED products today that you can procure. The price point is extremely high. So you got to be DOD to buy them. Yeah, but you don't want to work with that group. Yeah. They're big customers. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so the market opportunity is huge on all this AR, VR. And we've been in AR, VR for a long time.
There are just certain fundamental issues associated with all the display technologies that we recognized and have been working through. But this micro-LED solves a lot of problems on a lot of scales, not just AR, VR, but for DOD and a whole bunch of things. In particular, what the micro-LED gives you is extreme brightness. All right. You have to remember all our products compete with the sun. So you've got to be able to see our display in sunlight-readable conditions. And so, for instance, like an OLED, that's really not doable yet. But the micro-LED it is, our AMLCD it is. We have a very strong patent portfolio, over 200 patents and patent pendings. And that's the mugshots of the management team. And if there are any other questions, I'll be more than happy to take them.
Earlier, you were talking about that color refresh cycle with the government, military. Can you talk a little bit more about that? That seems really interesting. I didn't catch everything. Yeah. So the question was the refresh cycle of the products to go from monochrome green to color. And so essentially today, most of it is monochrome green. The DoD wants to go to color. But it's a little bit more than just going to color. They want certain symbology to have certain colors. So they want certain things to be blue and certain things to be red and certain things to be green.
And the reason why that's important is that you will see people, companies, I should say, will come out and say, "Hey, we have a display that can do 10,000 nits." And you say, "Wow, that's really great." But the reality is the way displays are made, it's red, green, blue. And the allocation is typically 70% green, 20% red, 10% blue. Well, so if you're only getting 10% out of 10,000, you're really only getting 1,000 nits of blue, which doesn't work because it's not bright enough for what the DOD is trying to achieve. If you look at our micro-LED as an example, we get 30,000 nits. And that's 30,000 nits of blue. So it's just a whole different scale, which is why they want it for all these different symbologies.
And so right now, what the DOD is looking at is on our F-35 as an example, it's all monochrome green. They're looking at going to a color OLED. And then they're even talking about going back and retrofitting all the existing monochrome greens with color OLEDs. So that's a program that, beyond just normal procurement, might have a complete refresh cycle for all existing products. Does any of this have applications on unmanned vehicles or drones or anything like that? Or does it require the involvement of a human to work? Only from the standpoint that we have inquiries. So the question was, does it have any applications to unmanned vehicles? And we have received inquiries for goggles that will be worn by soldiers who will be driving the drones.
You can't hook up your technology with some sort of artificial intelligence to make the drones smarter or anything like that or more effective or. So the question was whether we're using AI in any way with drones, and the answer is no. We are using AI with our NeuralDisplay, but not from a drone standpoint. Have you guys given any financial color heading into 2025? I'm looking at some statements and just seems fairly flat last few years. Just wondering when these opportunities you guys have will start to kind of pan out. So the question was, have we given any guidance for 2025, and the answer is not yet. When did the programs actually start ramping to generate revenue? So the question was, what's the timeline for the ramping of the revenue?
And so you're asking me to tell you how well the United States government works and the budgeting process. The programs that we're in is fairly straightforward. We have fairly good visibility and long times on the existing ones. Things like the Abrams tank, which are just coming into place, those are more difficult because it's usually when they do something like this, it's not just our technology. So if they're going to do a refresh on a tank, they're going to use multiple technology updates. And so we're kind of beholden to how everybody else does on their schedules. So that's what provides difficulty in determining it. We do know that the biggest program that we have going on potentially is this IVAS. This is a potential game changer for us. And that is in solicitation now.
You'll see that if you look at our press releases, we receive several of these SBIR. They're small business research programs. And when you look at the release, you say, "Oh, they got $1 million or they got $3 million to do this." And you might think, "That's not a big deal." But the way the procurement works is that, okay, when you do the SBIR stage one, you're at the very beginning of the building blocks of that technology. Then you go to SBIR 2, more proof of concept, make this. And then SBIR 3, you're really close to production. And the reason why that's all important is because that means you're at the beginning. So when the RFP comes out from the government for the production, you've kind of been in the game from the beginning.
So if the government comes out with an RFP, well, if you haven't been part of the process, the chance of winning it are very, very low, right? Because somebody else has already been in there. And so that's why as we announce these SBIRs, they're really a precursor to our potential growth. And we've announced a number of those last year, and we're continuing to work on a bunch more. And I think you'll see some more of those this year too. And a lot of this is around that IVAS program, which, as I said, is the multi-billion-dollar program. What are the competing alternatives to that? To IVAS? Yeah. So the question was, what are the competing alternatives to IVAS? So in all honesty, when I saw Microsoft was unable to make the program work.
But in all fairness to Microsoft, when I saw the criteria, there were like 54 things this thing had to do. It was a Swiss army knife. And at some point, you say, "I don't know if you can do all that stuff." So what we've done, and this is what I was saying we're going to demonstrate at the SHOT Show, is we've broken it down into smaller pieces and said, "Hey, we can provide you this technology today with clip-on devices to existing products." And so we call this IVAS Next, which is or IVAS Now, and then rather than the big program. Ultimately, I think that the IVAS will get broken down into multiple pieces. It's just so much for one. I mean, when I saw the device, it's a huge helmet. It was a thermal beacon.
You could spot a soldier a mile away wearing one of these things and so on. We think that they're just going to break it into smaller pieces. That's how our approach is right now. We're demonstrating to the government today that, "Hey, we can provide you a lot of the capability without waiting for the big program." Are you selling it to any militaries outside the country, or are they all domestic? The question was, do we sell to outside military? We sell to Elbit in Israel. We have BAE in Europe. Then we work with prime contractors who sell our products as part of their systems into foreign markets. We've had exploratory talks with some of the folks in Korea and Japan and so on. We'll see where that goes. All right. That's it. Thank you very much for attending.