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New Substrate Tech Creates System LCDs
smartalix writes "Sharp Microelectronics has recently developed a new LCD substrate technology called Continuous-Grain Silicon (CG-Silicon), that enables device integration on a scale previously impossible. The technology enables the creation of System LCDs that integrate all driver and operation circuitry -- including digital logic, LCD driver, power supply, I/O interfaces, and signal-processing circuitry -- onto the glass itself. Eventually even the device's CPU will be included on the substrate. A key SLCD feature is the ability to dynamically control the resolution and color depth, providing output in multiple-resolution modes while lowering overall power consumption. A 3.7-in. SLCD created with CG-Silicon had a power consumption of 14 mW for color VGA, 8 mW for color QVGA, and 2 mW for monochrome QVGA. The first commercially available product that incorporates the System LCD architecture is Sharp's Zaurus SL-C700 PDA, recently released in Japan."
... I think I'd rather have a CDL than an LCD.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
What the bejesus is QVGA?
okay great. now my LCD can think for itself.
but what ever happened to OLEDs & flexible LCDs?
The first commercially available product that incorporates the System LCD architecture is Sharp's Zaurus SL-C700 PDA, recently released in Japan.
/. about stuff that's supposed to make better displays cheaper, and then the product never comes to market.
If that's true, then it's about time. I can't count how many next-gen display technology announcements I've seen on
The fact that there's something already out there using it means that we're much more likely to see the technology become more widespread and adapted to other devices.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
but what ever happened to OLEDs & flexible LCDs?
OLED developments
Flexible LCD manufacturing/selling information
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
18mW for VGA, but you still need 6-7W at least for the backlight, nuuu???
..the System LCD architecture is Sharp's Zaurus SL-C700 PDA... .. will it run Linux?
As much as I love trusting the poster to have not made up a news story...here is the actual press release.
Btw, a direct link to the news article is here
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When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
circutry on glass?
Sweet, so when can we have computers that come on crystals like in the superman movie.
Oooh, can the glass go transparent? I'd love a window that doubles as a computer. I bet it can't
What is the physical mechanism that results in the increased electron mobility?
OR
Why is this groundbreaking?
Practical uses of this new technology include drawing the layman a picture detailed enough to explain it...
So then, what happens when I crack the screen? Time for an all-new Zaurus?
Wait a tick... that's bloody brilliant on Sharp's part!
I'm going to work on getting Sony and Nintendo to start integrating processing functionality into their controllers. Then, when somebody gets pissed and breaks one, they'll have to buy a whole new console!
I'm off to the USPTO, suckers!
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
that must be some rock you just crawled out from under
Oooh circuitry on the lcd panel itself. Does that mean that I'll get floating point errors and gp's if I press the glass to see the pretty colors?
Does this mean we'll be ablt to have those walkabout glass computer/tablet/pda/displays like on STNG?
Something else cheaper that that can be ubiquitous computing? That I can sit on and break?
Can the next DMCA outlaw back pockets?
Yaaaay.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The state of the OLED industry, with some timelines.
LCD driver, power supply, I/O interfaces CAUTION: To reduce the risk of electric shock, do not touch the screen.
Meet new people, and kill them.
and we would never be able to see out, 'cause they would all be BLUE.
A few months ago I was talking to someone who was working on using the transistors on LCDs to do actual computation. The problem was thet there is a hude varioation in speed between individual transistors. Making the worst case delay and clock distribution too painful to make the system usefull for anything.
They were at the Async confrence and they were very intrested in doing everything asynchronously. It makes sence as implementing the logic in asynchronous circuits solves both problems.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I'm asking... maybe it already exists. But it seems to me that one of the biggest hurdles in consumer electronics is that everyone wants a computer the size of a writswatch that somehow magically has a 21" flatscreen. Thus you see Apple producing laptops with both 12" and 17" screens.
Now one way to deal with the problem is to display to goggles/glasses. But that certainly has limits. Especially when cool embeded applications like the above are being developed.
[dream]
It seems like the ideal would be something that looks and feels much like a piece of paper (but less rippable). Fold/roll it up and put it in your pocket. Then unfold it and have a nice big surface you can view, touch, write-on, etc.
Even more ideally, this tech would be embedded in such a way that you could mass-produce pieces of v-paper for cheap. So you'd use it like paper, but it would have full color display and internet connectivity.
[/dream]
Plenty more to be found on google.
http://www.ixbt.com/short/2k2-11/sharp102.jpg
The part that really interests me is the ability of the same screen to use less power depending on what you want to do. I own a monochrome PDA for battery reasons, but I'd love to be able to switch to color mode when displaying photos or color maps. I can imagine resolution changes too - QVGA (the Q IS confusing, here it means quarter, but QUXGA means Quad UXGA) might be fine for looking up an address, but for a 3" by 4" photo display, I'd want Quad XGA (320 dpi is not possible now, but someday). Then you could vary between (1/4, 1, 4) x VGA to save power.
Of course, a flexible OLED would be great if it uses no more power and is flexible to boot.
Dara Parsavand
One word: WANT.
... but Dynamism have done their own English port already. (Any stories/opinions of Dynamism?)
Here's the press release and spec sheet.
It's coming to the US...
Keyboard doesn't look great (but at least it's better than the original tiny Zaurus one)
I've always wanted something tiny I could carry around that would give me decent QWERTY with a landscape screen capable of displaying VT100 readably (or, better, actual graphics) that could also connect to the net when I'm out and about. This looks like it (though expansion is limited to SD & CF - that's enough for WiFi and BlueTooth, though.)
-- Yoz
Those all-glass systems were the coolest thing about that movie. That and the glove-based gestural navigation system that Tom Cruise uses at the beginning of the movie. UI designer's dream and nightmare, all in one!
If your wife had an LCD Display on her back, you could watch football while you made love to her from behind, or watch pr0n, or something equally appalling. How cool would that be?!!!
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
This is a dup and was on Slashdot last year...
I print, therefore I am.
...after a long, hard boring meeting I laughed so hard at this that I spit my soda onto my keyboard and screen! Har! Thanks!
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
What kind of cost increase are we looking at here? Most of the higher end (higher res) PDAs are fairly expensive to begin with. Now throw in this new "innovation" and you're looking at increasing the price of something that's already pricey.
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" -- Homer Simpson
http://www.dynamism.com/zaurus/index.shtml
dupe 1
dupe 2
Aaaaaarrrrrgggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!
.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Crap. This means that we'll be dealing with displays that have completely integrated copy-protection mechanisms.
Even if current efforts such as Intel's HDCP are flawed, future versions of these technologies may not be amenable to cryptographic attacks, and hardware based attacks will be extremely difficult if the circuitry is embedded in the screen itself.
This falls perfectly in line with the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group's desire to mandate implementation of a broadcast flag that all devices must honor.
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
This technology combined with technology derived from Apple's new patent application, I wonder if we could have iPod's where the case itself displays the funky visualizations?
Just a thought.
... I am still waiting on an affordable flat-panel to replace this monitor. See, this is a 19" CRT, and I have yet to see a 19" flat-panel within my budget.
I liked it better the first time it was a dupe!
... and for just about the same reason, which is that you can build communication systems with cryptographic protection that don't have hooks for wiretappers. It's really two sides of the same coin, with the big difference being who decides what features they want to include and who decides the content being communicated. If your one-piece-communicator has hooks in it that let the Department of Homeland Security listen in on your video calls, the same features can also let Joe Script-Kiddie copy the movies you're watching on it. And besides, you didn't really want to take the lame analog feed from your monitor or use a logic probe to extract the signals between your CPU and onboard video GPU or audio d/a converter anyway just to pirate movies as opposed to grabbing them digitally where you can transmit or compress them, so a device with integrated LCD and video display won't change that much.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Here's a link: http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2002/1112/sharp 1.htm
You speak japanese, right?
These will be the large display/touch screens like what were plastered all over every control panel, console, and corridor wall in the Enterprise D of ST:TNG
how robust is the circuitry in the glass? I know on my iBook that on occasion when I try to move the screen back and forth to whatever position that I can see some slight discoloration around the area behind the screen where my fingers are pushing the screen into place. Will circuitry like this be able to handle that if it's put in a laptop? I would certainly like to think so, but am still curious about this.
Check out the Sharp Wizard OZ-770PC. (Big picture, specifications)
It's got a HUGE (for a handheld) keyboard, big enough to actually touch type at probably 50-75% normal speed, and a nice backlit landscape screen that can do proportional text and graphics (B&W only tho). A pair of AA's lasts 3-6 MONTHS in this thing.
It has 3MB of flash mem, and a genuine Z80 processor! You can code for this thing yourself in Basic, C, or even assembler, and there's lots of user written stuff to download. It's like having a complete 286-era system that fits in your shirt pocket.
Now, it's not Net enabled per se, however, it has a serial port, and there is terminal software written for it, so in theory you can connect it to a cell phone and access the Net through that.
It's several years old and discontinued, I lost mine recently and had to turn to E-Bay for a replacement. It's a really wonderful hacker's PDA though, and it has great community support. When I lost my original one, I did a bunch of searching for a modern PDA that has a similar design (large keyboard, landscape screen, clamshell case) and came up with nothing, especially for as low a price (it was $100 USD new)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I liked the part were a cereal box advertising display started spamming a commercial at Tom Cruise during a meal and he tosses it away. In minority rport, video displays were as cheap and ubiquitous a as paper. However, I think the inspiration was "electronic ink", a somewhat different technology.
On this flashy japanese page you can look at the C700 from different angles in both the input and viewing modes, as well as see the english specs.
OS: Linux Embedix
CPU: Intel XScaleTM(PXA250 400MHz)
RAM: Flash 64MB (user area about 30MB) and SDRAM 32MB (workarea)
Screen: 640x480 ("dots") 64K colors
Cardslots: SD, CF type II.
?: 4 hours, 50 minutes
Dimensions: 120mm W x 83 mm D x 18.6 mm H
Mass: 225g
The front page to get to this was from http://sl.ezaurus.com/ , from http://www.sharp.co.jp/
You need 6-7W for the backlight if you're using a CCFL (cold cathode flourescent lamp) to light the LCD, and then only for laptop screens. PDAs (and the new Gameboy Advance SP) use white LEDs, which run at low voltages and draw current on the order of milliamps, not amps.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/23/025124 6&mode=thread&tid=126
A 3.7-in. SLCD created with CG-Silicon had a power consumption of 14 mW for color VGA, 8 mW for color QVGA, and 2 mW for monochrome QVGA
I guess I am supposed to be awestruck by this, but in my ignorance I don't have a clue what is common power consumption today. Anybody knows?
Tor
Here
At Oct.22, Sharp coporation announced CG silicon technology.
CG silicon(continuous grain silicon) has continuity at grain boundary. Movement factor of electron is 600 times of that of amorphous silicon.
Z80 CPU implemented on a glass
Z80 on a glass is really working on a MZ-80 computer
CG silicon has high movement factor of electoron
Road map of System LCD architecture
In your shades...
Finally!!
It's amazing how much technological effort is going into advanced technologies for tiny screens. Is this actually useful, or profitable?
Just the driver electronics for the LCD itself. Traditionally, amorphous silicon LCDs have driver chips (made of bulk silicon) flip-chip bonded to the substrate because the amorphous transistors aren't up to the task.
Despite the publicity stunt of building a microcontroller on glass (which, if I recall, ran at about 8 MHz), they will be using this technology (at least right now) to make the display better, cheaper, etc, not to integrate all of the digital logic onto the display.
Think about it this way: it's really cheap to build a microcontroller on a silicon wafer, and it works great when you're done. Putting a bunch of digital logic on the display would be cool (hey, I can see through my microprocessor!), but it's not going to happen right now because it would hurt yield too much. Also, while the mobility of these transistors is better (and probably more consistent), they're still thin-film devices. They wouldn't be appropriate for building a high speed microprocessor.
-podom
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
Wonderful. With all of the controller electronics _and_ CPU on the display itself, the MPAA will be able to plug their "analog hole" as they've always wanted to. You won't be able to disable it. The display itself will be able to accept and authenticate "protected" input. Oh well. I knew it had to happen someday.