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27 May 2005
Highlights from the Society for Information Displays (SID) event that is taking place in Boston, US, this week.
OLEDs
• Cambridge Display Technology has claimed another milestone in the development of blue polymers for organic light emitting devices (OLEDs). Its blue polymer material has an estimated lifetime of 100,000 hours and an initial luminance of 100 cd/m2. The firm believes that the breakthrough will allow more applications to be realized using polymer OLED technology, such as full color displays for digital cameras and DVD players.
• A team of engineers and researchers from Universal Display Corporation and Kyung Hee University has achieved a record-breaking 200 dpi resolution in a transparent, monochrome, 120 x 160 pixel OLED display. The announcement is a boost for the development of transparent flat-panel screens, which have applications in architectural glasses and military helmet shields.
Large displays
• Samsung Electronics was showing the world's largest TFT-LCD display, an 82-inch version with high-definition quality. The firm has also produced what it claims is the world's first single-sheet 40-inch active matrix OLED display for emissive flat panel TV applications. Driven by an amorphous silicon (a-Si) active matrix backplane, the 1280 x 800 pixel screen offers all of the advantages of emissive OLED technology, such as a wide viewing angle and no backlight.
Electronic paper
• Philips unveiled a fully functional 4-grayscale rollable display that is said to offer "paper-like" viewing. The portable device uses a bi-stable electrophoretic display technology developed by US firm E Ink. The company also had a 42-inch 3D LCD monitor on show that requires no special viewing glasses and will be available from October this year.
"Green" screens
• Toshiba has come up with a line of environmentally friendly high-brightness LCD displays that meet the European Union's Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive.
Emerging technology
• Motorola Labs has devised a prototype nano-emissive display (NED) based on carbon nanotubes (CNTs). The firm estimates that a 42-inch NED running typical video would consume only 75 W compared with 180 W for a backlit LCD screen with matrix switching. "Our NED display is basically a thin, flat CRT with thousands of electron guns at each pixel," said the firm.
• SED Inc of Japan presented its 36-inch surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED). A potential challenger to the plasma display market, the screen is said to offer the performance quality of a CRT in a flat-panel format. The company, a joint venture between Cannon and Toshiba, plans to begin trial production of 50+ inch displays later this year.
Head-mounted displays
• Kopin offered its CyberDisplay SVGA device designed for mobile video eyewear and emerging military applications. The 0.59-inch, 800 x 600 pixel display features the firm's color-filter technology and has a power consumption of less than 100 mW.
Backlighting
• OSRAM Opto Semiconductors unveiled what it claims is the world's largest LED backlight. The 82-inch, door-sized module contains 1120 of the firm's red, blue and green Golden DRAGON LEDs and is capable of generating a color gamut that exceeds NTSC requirements by 50%.
• Cree says that its LED backlight technology reduces power consumption in LCD monitors and televisions by 60% compared with other LED backlighting and 12% compared with fluorescent solutions. The firm's backlighting is based on its energy efficient, high brightness XThin blue and green LEDs mounted to a thermally conductive substrate. The low-power set-up means that large screens can be designed without active cooling, such as fans.
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