60 Years of Information Display Brings Interesting Perspectives

IF YOU WANT SOME PERSPECTIVE ON JUST HOW FAR OUR BELOVED industry has come in the last few decades, look to SID's extensive archives, including conference proceedings, JSID, and of course Information Display (ID). First published in 1964, most of ID's issues from the ensuing years are available in the archives (archive.informationdisplay.org). Throughout the year, we will comb through past issues and reflect on interesting storylines from years gone by. Let me know if you have a favorite memory or milestone to share. To begin, we recognize ID's 60th anniversary with this first installment of the “Looking Back” series.

The very existence of liquid crystals (LCs) was a hotly debated topic until 1904. At that time, E. Merck (now known as Merck KGaA), a successful pharmaceuticals and chemicals company in Darmstadt, Germany, helped to settle this scientific dispute by providing highly pure liquid-crystalline materials to the public. Discovered first by Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer and later confirmed by German physicist Otto Lehmann, the liquid-crystalline state, or mesophase, was identified as a new, distinct state of matter that could occur between the solid and liquid phases.

In the February 2004 issue of ID, an article on the history of commercial LC materials¹ covered many decades of research into the uses for LCs (Fig. 1). It highlighted the discovery of the dynamic scattering mode published by George Heilmeier in 1967—and a year later, the first flat display employing LCs based on this effect. From there, the next five decades produced a groundbreaking and crucial technology building block for our entire industry.

Some of you still may have the glass mug commemorating 100 years of LCs. It was distributed during a special event at Display Week 2004 (Fig. 2). (I just had tea in mine the other day.)

Progress is fickle, so also in 2004, the changeover from cathode ray tube (CRT) to LCD and plasma direct-view TVs was gaining momentum. This was driven in part by the rapid adoption of DVDs for movies, the conversion from analog to digital TV, and the convergence of technologies that supported PC monitors and big-screen displays.² This was the last year for unit sales growth of large-screen CRTs and the first real year of growth for active-matrix (AMLCD) and plasma display panel (PDP) TVs. Even with the known performance limitations of flat panels at the time, the transition away from tubes was inevitable.

Technical challenges included the need for overdrive in LCDs to overcome artifacts because of response time limitations and ways to drive AMOLED panels with amorphous-silicon (a-Si) thin-film transistors (TFTs). This was driven in part by the limitations in producing poly-Si TFTs. We have come a long way!³

While early AMLCDs were struggling with performance challenges, the late 1990s and early 2000s provided a great window of opportunity for PDPs. They had a natural advantage in terms of viewing angle, gray-level contrast, response time, and they could be produced in larger sizes (40-inch diagonal and greater). They were the early favorite for large-size HDTVs until LCDs caught up by the late 2000s.

If you have ever wondered how the first plasma display was invented, the February 1999 issue of ID chronicles the history of how and why Donald Bitzer and Gene Slottow came up with their concepts, and how their wives think they should receive part of the credit.⁴ PDPs have an interesting history that was closely linked to SID and past-president Larry Weber. Larry founded Plasmaco, a seminal incubator of this technology. At Display Week 1994, his demonstration of a 21-inch full-color PDP not only started the momentum to commercial success but saved his company from foreclosure.⁵

In September 1998, Korea hosted what became the first SID Asia Display conference, which also incorporated the 18th annual International Display Research Conference (IDRC). Many PDP advances were on display, along with workshops on field-emission technology and the latest research on phosphors. The talk at the time was that display makers might achieve a sub-$2,000 50-inch PDP TV, LCD research was taking on viewing-angle challenges, and a 30-inch TFT-LCD was the world's largest built on a single sheet of glass. (Later, AMLCD panels 100 inches and larger were demonstrated.) Not to be left out, in 1998 the CRT folks were still hard at work with advanced phosphors and other performance improvements in a desperate effort to stay relevant.⁶

Another notable highlight from Asia Display 1998 was IBM's 16.3-inch 2,560 × 2,048 Quad SXGA (QSXGA), a-Si TFT-LCD technology demonstration. This was a 200-ppi flat-panel display with subpixels of 42 × 126 um. Because it was made with a-Si TFTs, the aperture ratio was only 27.3 percent. But it still was reported to have about half the power consumption of a similar-sized CRT display at that time. I had the privilege of seeing this same demonstration at another SID event, and it was really quite a sight. They showed full-color map data with a resolution similar to the best paper-printed maps. We now take for granted high-resolution displays, such as the Apple retina with 300 ppi or more, but to do this in 1998 in any format was quite a feat.

If you think flat panels were a product of the late 1990s and onward, think again. In 1974, engineers at Philco-Ford developed a fiber-optic device called a “digital lens,” which was essentially a wall-mounted display that could rotate and magnify an image from a much smaller source with a depth of just a few inches (Fig. 3).⁷ I don't remember ever seeing one of these working, but years later, interesting efforts were made to use fiberoptics to widen and tile images from LCDs to make seamless large-format displays.

I guess they knew what they were talking about even then. Fig. 4, taken from an advertisement in the October 1964 issue of ID, shows what a state-of-the-art business workstation concept looked like then.

All the items discussed come from the ID archives, which can be accessed through www.informationdisplay.org or archive.informationdisplay.org for the earlier years. These records are made possible by SID volunteers and supporters and are a continuing work in progress. If you have future ideas or feedback on this feature, please reply to [email protected].