Essential Science: The future of display technology, explained through pickles.
Display technology for computers has remained relatively stable for quite a few years since the introduction of current Liquid Crystal Display screens, most commonly known as LCD. These are based around a relatively simple structure consisting of layered silicon and glass, with individual pixels controlled via voltage. Three different coloured pixels allow for RGB, and a backlight shines through to display the image in full, bright colour.
The successor to LCD technology is perhaps more exciting for all the same reasons that LCD is so suitable today. This tech is called Organic Light Emitting Diode, and OLED technology is a completely rethought way of getting pixels to work together to form an image. Touting benefits such as longer battery life and much greater contrast levels, you might wonder how it achieves such impressive results.
As always the answer lies in the technology that powers OLED, starting with the complete removal of a backlight. This is due to the individual pixels themselves, described in a video posted on gizmodo (below) as organic material excited by an external current, causing the material to emit photons. This doesn't mean that the panels are made of flesh; organic simply means materials from the periodic table with organic properties such as Lithium or Magnesium.
By using three different versions of the organic emitters, one each for RGB, millions of them can be arranged onto a sheet in grid formation to work almost identically to the pixels in a LCD monitor. Varying amounts of current can be applied to each emitter to control the brightness of the resulting pixel, and since they create their own visible light there is no need for a backlight.
This reduction means that contrast levels can be incredibly high (when an area is black, the emitters are simply turned off) to give accurate colour reproduction, but it also reduces the physical width of the display itself - some panels being only 3mm thick in total. Power consumption is also dropped considerably by up to half compared to a LCD screen the same size, simplifying the design and requiring only 5v to power the emitters.
As explained in the video, the technology that first generation OLED screens are based off is almost ten years old, with future technological developments in this area seeing additional improvements to both power consumption and resolution. The possibility is also raised for flexible devices, such as Sony's prototype OLED screen shown in June 2007 that was able to be bent quite significantly while displaying video content.
A first-gen OLED screen debuted in the Microsoft Zune HD recently, but this technology has applications in everything from mobile phones to game consoles - and potentially is scalable to billboards and other large devices. Perhaps the most important use of OLED technology will be in large-panel televisions, with LG planning to release theirs in 2010. We're looking forwards to this exciting tech, and the next generation of computing.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012