In the past five years, spearheaded by major breakthroughs in density, cost, reliability and power dissipation of high voltage CMOS (smart power) integrated circuits, flat panel displays are being considered for an increasing number of applications in automotive dash-board displays. This paper will analyze the tradeoffs of the different flat panel display technologies suitable for automotive applications such as vacuum fluorescent, LCD (TN, SBE, SSF, TFT and NCAP), electroluminescent and plasma.
Over the past five years, the flat panel display technologies have made exponential advances. Their manufacturers have put tremendous pressure on the drive electronics suppliers with respect to low cost, high density, high reliability, high voltage capability, high speed logic, and low power consumption. In particular, the high voltage driver integrated circuits, because of their high count in the system, receive the most attention. This paper attempts to briefly describe the available basic display technologies and their drive electronics requirements, followed by a discussion of performance comparisons and market trends into the 1990's.
In any high pixel density panels, X-Y matrix addressing is necessary. Fig. 1 illustrates the typical voltages and waveforms required from the column and row driver integrated circuits, the resultant light output and typical response from the addressed pixel, and their critical dependence on the driver.