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'Computer-On-Glass' Display
bfries writes "Sharp Corp, Japan's largest maker of liquid crystal displays (LCDs), unveiled a screen Tuesday with microprocessor circuitry applied directly onto the glass, enabling it to function like a computer. It uses Sharp's continuous grain silicon (CGS) technology and should be used on some products in 2005."
- Coke Bottle PC
- Casserole PC
- Fish Tank PC
Wait, that last one's been done before...Just remind me to be excited again in three years. It's interesting, but not really news until there's, at the least, something to look at.
CRACK!
I'm curious about how these screens look. One of the issues with LCD is the screens appearance. They are often hard to view unless at a precise angle, if you wear glasses, especially polarized glasses, they are even harder to view. Touch screen films make them harder still to view and now they are embedding the actual circuitry in the display. What's the viewing like?
Glass is a very very poor heat conductor. Having anything running at a very low temperature on this would pale any laptop overheating horror stories. This would definately limit the power of the processor you can use. This would make a nice (and slower than 4.77mhz) palm top but nothing more.
When storage density reaches about 60 Gbits/sqin
you can store the all the data for a single pixal for a 90min movie within the area occupied by the pixal.
Once that's possible you can create dedicated movie "books".
I can't read japanese, but I believe this is a picture of what the article talks about.
sig.
Here is an overview of a case mod for such a system.
The processing power isn't great, but it did manage to support Wine.
I am a Karma Library.
Well they're talking about ultra-high resolutions for things like photographs, and maps. Of course this is going to need huge storage and processing abiliy if they're going to reporduce photographic quality on anything larger than a really small display. I'm guessing that the display would probably be most useful if it could dynamically change resolution perhaps displaying several resolutions at once, to combine video (HDTV perhaps) a computer output at a "normal resolution" (90dpi or so) and a photo quality section (say 300dpi or better).
The abiliy to offload some of the processing on the display would be very helpful. I can see that being a very useful display. Still the idea of storage on the display sounds like Minority Report to me. Very cool.
Reading up on the CGS link, it looks like the technology has a medium-imposed 1 GHz hard upper limit, since it's not really a single silicon crystal, but a set of crystals ("grains" in MatSci speak) in which some effort is made to blur the lines between the grains (hence "continuous"). My guess is some sort of annealing process. The grain boundaries become
a problem at 1 GHz.
What if the screen was made up of two pieces of glass, with water being passed between them? Water is obviously a proven way to transfer heat and it would be invisible to the user.
..have a Beowolf cluster of Windows PC's !
*Runs for cover*
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
I don't see the significance of this.
Large Photo in Reuters.
and I saw a rock hit the windshield with a loud crack. As one of the cracks slowly grew across the windshield, different parts of the car started malfunctioning until finally, the engine sputtered to a stop...
I can just hear the engineers... "Well we already have to put circuitry on the windshield for the HUD.. why don't we just go ahead and put the fuel injection computer and all the other electronics there as well..."
Hey, you think it wouldn't happen? I bet you thought that refrigerators would never have Internet access either...
--sg
Dupe posts are
I can make my house windows out of these things and project happy people interacting on them. I can fool the whole neighborhood into thinking I have friends.
[sigh]
- Portable (touch-type?) displays you can plug in anywhere. Download new library books by chapter (into temporary memory?).
- Restaurant tables? TV's: watch the game on your table. Virtual colouring books for kids
- Forget the coloured contacts. Glasses will come back in style as you get your own mini-HUD
The bad- Billboards, now every office window can be one!
- Spyglass-capabilities
- And you thought your palm broke easily when you dropped it
The uglyGlass is primarily SiO2 or "silica", but what we go around calling glass has plenty of additives. Most of what we call glass is actually soda-lime glass, so called because it contains ample ammounts of soda (Na2O) and lime (CaO). Those two ingredients help lower the melting point of SiO2 and make it a lot easier to process. Pyrex is a brand name for borosilicate glass and its composition allows it to be very strong and resistant to thermal shocks (this is why you can put Pyrex in the oven without worrying about it shattering). LCD glass is probably different alltogether.
Very pure amorphous SiO2 glass can be made, but it is much more expensive and is often sold as "fused silica" or "fused quartz".
True "quartz" is a crystalline (ordered) phase of SiO2, and it is not the only one. Crystoballite and tridymite are two other crystalline phases of quartz.
In any case, SiO2 is a dialectric, and not a semiconductor, so the computation being done in this story is all contained in the layers on top of the glass and not in the glass itself.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.