Raytheon Joins Flat-Panel Screen Project : Technology: A U.S.-Japanese-French consortium hopes to bring about a revolution in commercial and military electronic displays.

Raytheon Co. said Tuesday that it has joined a U.S.-Japanese-French consortium to build a new kind of flat-panel screen that it hopes will revolutionize electronic displays on everything from laptop computers to radar.

Other members of the group include Texas Instruments Inc.; Pixel International, a French electronics firm, and Futaba Corp. of Japan, also an electronics company, said Raytheon, which is based in Lexington, Mass.

The high-performance screens can now be found in laptop computers and are used by the military. The group will build the screens for military and commercial use, said William Swanson, senior vice president and general manager of Raytheon’s missile systems division.

The ultra-thin screens are called field emission displays. The quarter-inch glass plates are expected to replace bulkier television picture tubes in applications such as aircraft instruments, air traffic control monitors, computer screens and industrial displays.

The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency has projected the global market for flat-panel display screens at $40 billion annually by 2000.

A little more than a month ago, the White House proposed spending up to $1 billion to help U.S. flat-panel makers compete with Japanese manufacturers, who produce most of the displays.

A few U.S. companies have less than 3% of the global market for flat panels.

A Raytheon spokesman declined to say how much the company will spend on the project.