SID News: Wednesday

17 Jun 2002

Large-scale electroluminescent screens and flexible plastic liquid crystal displays are unveiled in Boston.

At the Society for Information Display (SID) conference in Boston, US, Westaim subsidiary iFire Technology of Canada showed a 17 inch prototype electroluminescent display. The device is the next step in its plans to produce mid-30 inch screen-size panels for the television market.

iFire president Michael Goldstein said: "It demonstrates that we can scale our display technology without compromising performance. It has equivalent performance characteristics and is four times larger than the display we showed at last year's SID conference."

The company presented three technical papers at the conference explaining the phosphor materials, phosphor patterning techniques and the efficient resonant integrated supply (ERIS) power management system. These allow wide XGA (1280 x 768 pixel) devices in the mid-30 inch range to operate on less than 200 W.

Following a year-long collaboration with US-based ClairVoyante Laboratories, Korean company Samsung unveiled three LCD product prototypes based on a novel pixel layout called Pen Tile: a 15 inch UXGA, a 1 inch QXGA and an HDTV-capable 1 inch wide-XGA.

The Pen Tile matrix delivers the same resolution from half as many subpixels and column drivers compared with standard LCD screens, producing the same brightness while using up to 40 per cent less power.

US companies Viztec and FlexICs have entered an agreement for the joint evelopment of flexible, plastic active matrix LCDs for mobile phones and PDAs.

The companies will integrate Viztec's plastic-pixel LCD nanotechnology with FlexICs' ultra-low temperature polysilicon active matrix architecture.

Author
Phillip Hill is editor of Displays Europe and a contributing editor of Opto & Laser Europe magazine.