Afterthoughts On SID '08 Are Hardly An Afterthought
Display Week, also known as SID 2008, left some clear impressions about the state of display technologies. Various forms of LCDs (Liquid Crystal Devices) created most show activity. This is a mature and dominant technology, widely used in television sets, computer displays and handheld products. Check out the highlights from the show...
Read more...
Electronic paper is about far more than reading books on an Amazon Kindle. E-Ink takes you through a fast tour of the possibilities.
Osram's SID-2008 booth showed off a wide array of display applications. Hang on for a whirlwind tour.
LEDs may be beginning to eclipse CCFLs in display backlighting, but there's room for both technologies. Endicott Research Group talks about the challenges of providing efficient power supplies for LEDs and CCFLs.
Global Lighting's microlens light guides are key to edge-lighting large-screen LCD displays with LEDs. In fact, the combination of Global Lighting's guides with Luminus Devices' photonic lattice LEDs in Luminus' PhlatLight 46" BLU backlight assembly won SID 2008's Gold Award. The BLU is built from only eight microlens light guides, each with only single red, green, and blue Phlatllight LEDs.
Microvision's pico projector was the hit of the SID 2008 plenary session, throwing large, full-speed video on the conference room wall from a cell-phone-size device. The breakthrough, the company says, is the recent availability of safe output-level green lasers that match the characteristics of previously available red and blue lasers.
RPO's optical fiber technology inexpensively collimates and registers thousands of lightguides to create inexpensive touch-screens with advantages over capacitive approaches. Using single LED and a single imager chip simplifies the electronics, yet allows full two-finger image manipulation.
Tannas Electronic Displays has carved out a unique niche serving clients who need one-off or small quantities of displays of non-standard size, or who need to replace older-technology displays such as plasma panels, electroluminescent displays, or CRTs that are no longer available with an LCD that retains the operating characteristics of the original display. Using their patented methods of resizing commercially manufactured LCDs, they can fill these clients' needs at a fraction of the cost of developing and producing a custom LCD.
Lumninus takes advantage of photonic lattices, structures developed at Sandia National Labs, to create "Phlatllight" LEDs, which are arguably the brightest LEDs at SID 2008. Coupled with Global Lighting Technologies' Microlens light guides, they enable efficient backlighting of very large flat panel displays with only a small number of LEDs.
Other news from SID
Development Kit Enables Multi-Touch Interfaces
According to Stantum Inc., the SMK-15.4 is the first commercially available and out of- the-box development kit that allows users to build unlimited multitouch user-interfaces for future products or research projects. The kit provides all the necessary components for creating a high performance, one-stop multi-touch system.
LCDs Meet Demanding Industrial Specs
Groomed for rugged industrial installations, the 5.7 in. LQ057V3DG02 and 8.4 in. LQ084V3DG01 VGA TFT-LCDs from Sharp Electronics Inc., meet the company’s Strong 2 criteria for industrial display technology, which defines stringent standards for brightness, contrast, temperature range, shock, and vibration.
Afterthoughts On SID ‘08 Are Hardly An Afterthought
Display Week, also known as SID 2008, left some clear impressions about the state of display technologies. Various forms of LCDs (Liquid Crystal Devices) created most show activity. This is a mature and dominant technology, widely used in television sets, computer displays and handheld products. Check out the highlights from the show.
Wacom, E Ink Integrate Pen Input With E Paper
Wacom and E Ink Corp. are partnering to integrate Wacom’s Penabled digital pen input solution with E Ink’s Visplex electronic paper. E Ink’s Broadsheet AM300 prototyping kit, which will be available in a 6-in. diagonal size in June and other sizes later, combines the two technologies in a solution that mobile computing manufacturers can easily integrate into their product designs.
Qualcomm Shows First IMOD Color Display
As part of its phased approach to moving mirasol displays into mainstream devices, Qualcomm MEMS Technologies demonstrated what it said was the first reflective interferometric modulation (IMOD) color mirasol display at SID 2008. The first 0.9-in. IMOD color mirasol display will be introduced by Freestyle Audio in its next-generation MP3 player product line.
Samsung Unveils 82-in. Ultra-Definition LCD Panel
An 82-in. LCD TV panel with ultra-definition (3840- by 2160-pixel) resolution at a 120-Hz refresh rate was one of several products introduced by Samsung Electronics Co. at the SID International Symposium, Seminar, and Exhibition. The UD panel’s 120-frame/s rate minimizes the blurring that is sometimes experienced at 60 Hz.
DuPont, Dainippon Ally On OLEDs
DuPont and Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Co. Ltd. are forming a strategic alliance to develop integrated manufacturing equipment for printed organic LED (OLED) displays. The companies also signed an agreement relating to their intention to bring together the elements—materials, technology, and equipment—needed to mass produce OLED displays.
OSRAM LED Modules Backlight 42-in. Curved Display
Ostendo Technologies Inc. is using OSTAR-Projection LED modules from OSRAM Opto Semiconductors to backlight a new ultra-wide curved display. The compact OSTAR-Projection modules used in the DLP-based CRVD screen consist of six RGB LED chips that use OSRAM’s Thinfilm and ThinGaN chip architecture.
Reflector LED Backlights Mid-Size LCDs
Suitable for backlighting 5- to 20-in. LCDs, the CERAMOS reflector LED provides high brightness and power in a small package measuring 2.3 by 3.2 by 0.8 mm. This product, designed by Osram Opto Semiconductor, is suited for light-guide-based backlighting in high ambient light conditions, the component fits into light guides as thin as 2 mm.
RGB LED Enables Very Thin Displays
The MicroSIDELED RGB LED from Osram Opto Semiconductor features an ultra-slim design and delivers high brightness coupling into light guides for backlighting. It measures 5 by 1.4 by 0.6 mm and integrates three individual color chips. The LED reportedly projects more than 100% of NTSC on screen depending on the LCD.
LED Driver Boards Go Plug And Play
Poised for a wide range of industrial and medical LCDs, the SFDE (economical) and SFDM (mini) series LED driver boards from Endicott Research Group provide full function power supplies and measure less than 5 mm in height. Both promise brightness stability over a wide input voltage and can power up to six LED strings.
Uni-Pixel Demonstrates TMOS Display Technology
Uni-Pixel Inc. used SID’s DisplayWeek 2008 to make the first public demonstration of its Time Multiplexed Optical Shutter (TMOS) color display technology.
SID 2008 - Electronic Design Preshow
The Society for Information Display's (SID) annual international convention and exhibition opens Sunday at the Los Angeles Convention Center for an expected 9500 engineers and scientists. The event is devoted to electronic information displays and it is a place to learn from the experts about the “hows” and “whys” of display device operation.
