Development of Color STN LCD for Automotive Information Display

We have developed an automotive information display which provides high resolution and high display quality by using a newly developed film compensation STN LCD (FST).

The key issue of this FST development is optimization of compensation film, LC mixture, color filter and cell design for automotive application. Further, in order to realize bright and highly visible display, compensation conditions of FST is carefully examined, and a newly developed Warm Cathode Fluorescnet Lamp (WFL) is adopted for a backlight. WFL has advantages of both Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp and Hot Cathode Fluorescent Lamp, and provides a high light intensity with dimming capability.

Such new technologies of FST and WFL are combined with peripheral technologies which integrate those key components into a total display system. Prototyped display based on these technologies and its results are reported in this paper.