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New Display Technology to Compete with LCDs?
NetRanger writes "C|Net's News.com has a really interesting article to a new display technology that is based on interference of light patterns. The company, Iridigm, has a very compelling case for why their display method is far superior to LCD, including far brighter displays, far less power consumption... but the cool this is that the display actually works like RAM (it retains its state until voltage is applied to reset it) -- so what do you see when the driver crashes?"
That's gonna make shutting off the monitor real fast to hide the porn from your (wife/boss/Priest/Teacher) a lot more difficult.
Therefore, this tech will never fly.
So, if we can project this trend out, when do I need to start wearing sunglasses while I'm in the office?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I've noticed that some frame buffers on laptops tend to retain images from other modes in memory till you go into that mode. So if I like crash my laptop looking at a pr0n site, reboot, when X starts, I will see what I saw till X redraws the screen... normally about half a second....
What speed? DDR? SDR? will it be adversely affected by magnetic fields? I know my LCD isn't phased by having my speaker right next to it, but my CRT sure as hell was... Will this thing be sensitive to EM?
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
It seems like it would *look* beautiful, but would be costly to operate.
Of course, if you're going to shell out the cash for this, then you're probably not going to be worried about the electric bill.
Still sticking to my CRT for now...
If a and b in c, and a can create b, and a can create a, and b can create b, and b cannot create a, then a created c.
They're based on moving the membrane every time a pixel changes color. Wonder how many times you can do that before the membrane develops stress fractures.
Wonder if fractures would cause a failure, too.
I guess as long as it's at least as long as the expected useful life of an LCD backlight it's still a win.
The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
Hmm... No product displays at the website. Just some diagrams and a a photoshopped display.
That said, I'm currently tied to CRT technology because a lot of the media I have to deal with is color matched. Since color on a CRT screen is unreliable... it changes if you look at your screen from a different direction... this could offer a great deal of help to people like me who are tied to heavy, bulky displays rather than sweet flat-panels.
Of course the key here is that they have to deliver everything they promise in the way of omni-directional viewing and color-correctness.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
If my computer crashes, leaving something unpleasant on my screen, can I clear it by picking it up and shaking it?
Not so much a sig as a lack of one.
Only like SRAM, not DRAM.
SRAM is pretty much static until changes are made, DRAM you'll hear described like a leaky capacitor. When you give it a charge it will slowly loose it, so you need to refresh it... many many times per second.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The real potential comes when they can isolate sections of the screen to update. Since most screens remain, I would say, 80% the same, this could greatly increase the battery life of laptops since the screen is one of the largest power consumers. Isolating sections would allow only a small section to draw power when changed. The key would to make the sections as small as possible (pixel?) so that mouse movements don't cause un update to 1/4 the screen.
RTFA !
The display uses two plates on each pixel that can get closer or farther one from the other. The interference occur in the reflective part of the monitor, only to create the right frequency. Just like a spinning black and white thing can take any perceived color, depending on the rotation rate. In their case, the distance between the plates modulate the light color. Once a ray leaves the screen, it is of a given color and won't change anymore.
What I didn't see is the issue of lighting the surface. This needs a front light. Put the technology has one main advantage: it can emits any visible frequency. Hence, its gamut should be much larger.
J.
I don't quite think the poster understood the article. From the article:
Once a voltage has been applied to an iMoD element, it requires less power to hold the metallic layer in place than it does to move it.
Looks to me that *some* power is still required to keep the display going. If it loses power the layers would go back to their default state (which while the article does not state, it would appear its white when its off).
Likewise this statement:
but the cool this is that the display actually works like RAM (it retains its state until voltage is applied to reset it)
I'm no RAM expert but from my understanding (with current RAM), as soon as power is lost, so is the data. Unless you're talking about old magnetic RAM from the 50's and 60's, or IBM's upcoming MRAM, but I seriously doubt you were thinking of those.
//m
but the cool this is that the display actually works like RAM (it retains its state until voltage is applied to reset it)
Cool, some people will get to watch their BSOD's a few seconds more.
On a serious note, I wonder if this could actually cause video card makers to make cards that use memory that does not have to be dynamically refreshed, since the monitor pixels can hold the image. Might reduce memory latency for the frame buffers of the future.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
The power of Iridigm displays derives from the replication of some of Mother Nature's most beautiful creations: Butterflies.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Porn Screen Of Death?
More like Porn Screen Of Divorce in my case...
There are millions of CRTs out there helping businesses make money. Now these CRTs and to a lesser extent LCDs are also costing companies money through mainly power costs. There are also some health and safety issues that cost money through the running of lighting and cost of fixtures and fittings, but we'll let these out for now.
So, where do you have a CRT monitor and an application environment where high performance in the frame rate isn't an issue? Hmmm, how about every call centre in the world. If an IT manager sees the cost benefits of getting low power consumption monitors he or she will bite. If an accountant sees the numbers they'll bite the arm off the salesman. I can see these taking off in a big way with Call Centres and programming shops.
There's a market there for these things, I'd like to see how they do with CAD/CAM apps too.
sic transit biscuitus
This technology is great for displaying text (and pictures of butterflies) but it is very bad for games.
Look at the description of how it works. The colour is determined by the distance between glass layer and the metal plate. Big gap = red. Small gap = blue.
This is fine for static images, but it means that it takes 5 times as long for a red pixel to change state as it does a blue one.
When you have a quickly moving image, the result in severe ghosting for red objects. White objects will leave a rainbow trail - red at the far end, blue near the object. Blue objects are relatively unaffected.
If you do use this for playing Quake 3, just make sure you're on the blue team.
You have to appreciate post-Dot.Com tech reporting:
provide breif overview of how new technology actually works - consult glossy side of start-up's brochure/PowerPoint presentation
Thank you c|net for providing us all with that fine peice of tech journalism. Too bad Richard Shim couldn't fill more copy space by staring at Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, and had to resort to describing technology halfway through the article.
credo quia absurdum
IANAEES....
Both SRAM and DRAM require constant power to reliably store data.
SRAM differs from DRAM because the cells that hold bits are always charged [howstuffworks has a diagram, basically its 5 logical gates in feedback]. As a result SRAM takes more power but has no refresh delays [and is bigger]
DRAM uses capacitors to store the data and requires refreshing. This makes DRAM smaller, less power instense but much slower.
For example, cache inside processors is a version of SRAM. If SRAM were as cheap as DRAM we'd be seeing 2MB caches common place nowadays...
Anyways... Peace out.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
To solve the problem of undesired residue on the screen the manufacturer could add a slider on the bottom of the unit that the user would slide from one side to the other - erasing the content :).
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their primary focus is "mobile phones, Smart Phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), two-way pagers, game players, and other mobile appliances". It could be that these displays are impractical for some reason (perhaps fabrication) in larger sizes. As usual with technology like this, the real issue is scaling production.
IIRC isn't this a property of Light Emitting Polymers? At least not the first incarnations, or the later revisions in that a charge is only needed to change the polymer state... so more power is used when viewing a constantly changing images (i.e. multimedia), whereas spreadsheet/office use would be on the lower end of the power scale.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
If you actually look through their site, it looks like they are aiming for the PDA market, not the desktop display. Perhaps a limitation of the technology, perhaps a really good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of their product.
Interesting that the site spouts off on touch screen technology. I've always loved the spontaneous change of LCD to LSD when you press on you LCD pannel, with these, you might just semi-permenantly change the pixel!
And they are showing progress, definitely beyond the "vaporware" that some commentors have said. It appears that they *have* a working product that they demo'ed in May of 2000.
Iridigm Demonstrates First Color iMoD Matrix(TM) Display
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - May 20, 2002 - - Iridigm(TM) Display Corporation, a developer of flat panel displays for mobile devices, will demonstrate its iMoD Matrix(TM) technology at the Society for Information Display (SID) International Symposium in Boston, Massachusetts. During the Exhibition portion of the conference held May 21-23, 2002, Iridigm will demonstrate the color iMoD Matrix(TM) display in its booth #1805/1807. This is world's first direct-view color flat panel display based on MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems).
Continued here
www.christopherlewis.com
How do they get color graduations? If the plates are bistable, how do they get more than 8 colors (with each of red, green, and blue being either on or off)? Or can they make the plates hover in-between stable states by applying a current?
I heard on NPR the other day an even neater sounding alternative that is about five years off.
_
It uses the fact that certain plastics when charged with electricity will emit light and certain colors. The screen would be flat and completely flexible.
Literally you would have a screen (a TV for example) that could be rolled up and put into your backpack.
Right now they are looking into small scale electronics applications of the technology in terms of putting in screens for car radios and such but they have the big plan of a flexible plastic tv or computer monitor.
Of course if you pay attention is the fact that it needs no backlighting and can be extremely thin. Very neat stuff.
_______________________________________________
ACK
They claim that since the entire display is inorganic, it's insensitive to temperature variations. Looks like the marketing folks have gone a bit too far on this one. Metal and glass have very different coefficients of thermal expansion. That suggests that the metal layer will be under tension at cold temperatures and under compression at high temperatures. This should affect the interference layer thickness achieved at a particular voltage. I expect that this will, at the very least, affect the display colors since interference wavelength is very sensitive to the thickness of the interference layer.
Anyone care to do the math?
How can we afford to ever sleep
So sound again
--ebtg
I'd really like to have some photographers chime in on this one.
...why?
I'm a photographer myself and "amateur" would be an understatement. I've always been vexed by the inability of the camera to record what I see. For example, I went to the Boston Aquarium a few months back and while my shots were acceptable, the colors were nothing like what I was seeing in-person. Brilliant blues and yellows look painfully muted and boring in my results. I'm told that is a shortcoming of the photography medium and photographers have to use tricks to get those wonderful colors you see in mags like National Geographic, Photo, etc. Well
So what I guess I'm asking is "can this technology be used to not only create and present colors in a 'natural' way but possibly capture them that way as well?"
My
Limekiller
You bring up an interesting point: it's not clear how a device like this can produce different saturation levels for a pure hue. In other systems, a single subpixel has a single color but variable intensity, and subpixels of different colors can be combined to produce a range of colors. In this system, each subpixel is capable of producing any color, but only at an intensity defined by ambient light. Consider a three-subpixel unit where each subpixel can be either white, red, or black. This gives only the following possibilities: white, black, two shades of grey (BBW, BWW), and six kinds of red (RRR, RRB, RRW, RBB, RBW, RWW). Now, a single subpixel could be cyan or indigo all by itself, creating a different kind of flexibility, but I'm not sure if that's as useful as what we get with variable-intensity RGB subpixels.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
SRAMs can be designed for raw speed (CPU caches) or low power (CMOS memory in old PCs before flash). High speed SRAMs can suck down a lot of power due to all of the gates and frequent logic transitions.
OTOH, The low power SRAMs intended for nonvolatile storage use all CMOS FET transistors in their logic gates. These gates draw essentially zero current unless they are actually switching.
Thus, while low power SRAMs require a voltage (typically supplied by a battery) to retain their state, they draw no current when idle. Therefore, in a technical sense, they don't actually require "power" (voltage*current) to keep their state, just a static potential.
A hydraulic analogy would be rigging two toilet flush flap valves in series, then ensuring that they never open simultaneously. This setup could store one bit (1 - open/closed, 0 - closed/open) with just static water pressure and zero flow. (A little water would flow when the valves are actually flipped.)
(btw, IAAEE)
Hook it up to a cellular network and they can download new ads into it....or even better, the states could have an emergency warning/traffic system to take over the billboards when needed...endless possibilities.
//m
Uh, no. Framerate in general has nothing to do with the actual display, although the image will look better if the two are in synch at some multiple.
Framerate, at least when you're talking about gaming, is how fast the game engine and graphics card can update memory. The refresh rate is how fast the electron beam is swept across a CRT. LCDs don't have refresh rates, but they do have response times And I would assume this thing would as well.
The "frame rate" on an LCD or one of these things is 1/response time.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Static RAM certanly does not maintain state when the power goes out. However, it does require very little power to maintain state, and no special circuity.
SRAM is basically something like 6 transistors per bit.
DRAM, on the other hand, not only requires power to maintain state, but also requires special refresh circuitry. This is because a bit in DRAM is effectively a transistor and a tiny capacitor.
If SRAM were as cheap as DRAM we'd be using it for system memory and might not even need cache at all.
Not necessarily. There's an inherent slow-down associated with large address spaces. Not to mention the heat decipation. Heck, why else do we have 3 to 5 layers caching? The practical approach is to have successive layers of cheaper, larger and slower memory.
Since we already have 8 meg caches (in some high end machines), there's little value in doing away with multi-gig low-power, low-cost memories. Theoretically some apps will achieve noticable performance gains, but at enormous costs (today at least).
Furthermore, DRAM with internally managed refresh logic is functionally identical to SRAM (but non-deterministically slower). For something like video memory which regularly touches every byte of memory, the refresh logic would be unnecessary; thereby speeding up the memory. Further, DRAM is sufficiently performant enough to handle refreshes. 4MB * 80fps (for true color 1280x1024) = 320MBps. DDR can handle 2.1GBps alone. This doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of interleaving/banking/segmentation or what-ever types of tricks they may utilize.
-Michael
the eye strain isn't caused by interference with 60hz the power circuits. Modern monitors have a lot of protection from things like that.
The problem is that you can see the image blinking on and off, and it's annoying. I can still see flicker at 70hz, and in general prefer something in the 80s.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Most metals exist in more than one form of crystal matrix. These different types of crystals exist in almost every chunk of metal you find. You will usually end up with a small area of one form of crystal (with all atoms lined up in the same direction) which is surrounded by another form of crystal. These small areas are called grains. The smaller these grains are, the more easily the metal bends, due to the fact that the atoms on the edge of a grain do not bond well to the atoms outside the grain.
When you bend metal you tend to form more grains in it, due to the movement breaking up existing grains and splitting them into smaller pieces. The increase in grains causes the metal to weaken, even if it is a small amount every time. If the metal is allowed to "relax" for a period of time, there is the chance that two extremely close and aligned grains will convert the atoms between them into their crystaline form. This reduces the amount of grains and re-stiffens the material. This re-conversion is very slow under normal temperatures and pressures and thus is a minor effect.
You can increase the grain size and lower the number of grains by heating the metal at a certain temperature for a period of time. If you then quickly cool the metal (quench it in water, for example) you will end up with a harder material (but more brittle). This is how blades are made that hold an edge and stay sharp, the harder the blade is the better it will hold an edge. However, if you make the blade too hard then it will not bend at all and it will be brittle.
Sapere aude!
yep - my workmate has a cell phone (motorola, i *think*) that has an OLED display. it is BRIGHT BLUE! i thought it was vacuum florescent the first time i saw it.
Actually, that stuff's electroluminescent tape.
http://www.3dxtreme.org/pcmodstape.shtml
Not quite the same as an OLED.
Si
Coming soon - pyrogyra
ECL was fast, but it was just about as opposite of CMOS as you can get. It works using bipolar transistors to continually shunt large currents through resistors even when the gate is idle. That single 1K chip I worked on probably drew several of watts of power. Nevertheless, it was considered to be a SRAM.
(The mainframe CPUs put a hundred or more ECL chips on a ceramic substrate, then used the mother of all water cooled heatsinks to pull out the massive heat that was generated.)
The way the display works, I think the light would have to be reflective, not coming from the back. It appears to use the property of Iridescence.
The lighting would have to come from the side, and would reflect off the display.
One major advantage of this tech is that it should look better as the light gets brighter!
You'll have to excuse me, I was shooting from the hip and didn't realize that I had made a mistake in my original discussion.
I originally said, "When you bend metal you tend to form more grains in it, due to the movement breaking up existing grains and splitting them into smaller pieces. The increase in grains causes the metal to weaken, even if it is a small amount every time."
This is not exactly true, it had been a while since I studied metallurgy and I didn't have any reference texts to consult. To clarify, the reason the metal weakens is not that the number of grains is increasing and making the material more ductile (easily bendable), but that the dislocations (areas of stress in the metal matrix) and impurities are getting moved to the edge of the grains and are collecting together. This means that less of the metal has flaws distorting its structure and is therefore harder. Since it is harder it is now less flexible and more brittle. This causes micro cracks to form during the bending. Eventually these cracks lengthen and the metal fails.
Work hardening occurs when the metal is plasticly deformed. These deformations cause impurities and other strains to gather together and less distort the structure of the metal. Since more of the metal is ordered, it is harder than it was originally.
One thing you should know is that metallurgy is very complex. There are many factors which enter into the equation, such as grain size, alloys, impurities, many different phases (crystal structures) of the metal, etc. Often simply how the metal is composed, heated, cooled, worked can vastly change its properties.
Here are some sites to study more about metallurgy:
PLANT MATERIAL PROBLEMS - a site on metal failure
Metallurgical Terms Made Simple - a site on the basics of steel metallurgy
The Metallurgy Of Carbon Steel - a more in-depth analysis of steel metallurgy
Sapere aude!
LCDs don't produce their own light either. They need backlights. Since these new screens are *much* more reflective than existing LCD screens, they have a reduced need for illumination anyway.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Light reflects off two surfaces, one just beneath the other. If the distance between the surfaces is such that the reflected light waves are perfectly out of phase, the waves will cancel eachother out, making it look like the surface actually absorbs that frequency range, producing color. That means that the distance the light travels between the plates is absolutely crucial in producing the right color. That's why butterfly wings shimmer. Your eyes are each viewing the wing at a different angle, each seeing a different color.
When light hits the plates striaght on, the light travels a certain distace between the plates. But when light hits at an angle, it travels slightly farther, depending on the angle. So, for example, instead of being out of phase at 600nm, light at 620nm will be out of phase, making a different color appear if you look at a different angle.
So unless I missed something, what we'll end up with is a display that "shimmers" like a butterfly wing. The hue of the display will shift when the screen is angled. That means that the effective viewable angle will suck a lot more than it does for LCDs, and it will be almost impossible to be perfectly sure what color you're looking at (particularly important for desktop publishing).
Perhaps someone who knows more about physics can explain how they intend to make this actually work. For now, though, I'm going to wait till I see a working prototype before I sell the farm to invest in their product.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925