Plasma displays are bright, have a wide color gamut, and can be produced in fairly large sizes, up to 262 cm (103 inches) diagonally. They have a very low-luminance “dark-room” black level, creating a black some find more desirable for watching movies. The display panel is only about 6 cm (2½ inches) thick, while the total thickness, including electronics, is less than 10 cm (4 inches).
Plasma displays use as much power per square meter as a CRT or an AMLCD television. Power consumption will vary greatly depending on what is watched on it. Bright scenes (say a football game) will draw significantly more power than darker scenes. The xenon and neon gas in a plasma television is contained in hundreds of thousands of tiny cells positioned between two plates of glass.
Long electrodes are also sandwiched between the glass plates, in front of and behind the cells. The address electrodes sit behind the cells, along the rear glass plate. The transparent display electrodes, which are surrounded by an insulating dielectric material and covered by a magnesium oxide protective layer, are mounted in front of the cell, along the front glass plate. Control circuitry charges the electrodes that cross paths at a cell, creating a voltage difference between front and back and causing the gas to ionize and form a plasma; as the gas ions rush to the electrodes and collide, photons are emitted.
In a monochrome plasma panel, the ionizing state can be maintained by applying a lowlevel voltage between all the horizontal and vertical electrodes – even after the ionizing voltage is removed. To erase a cell all voltage is removed from a pair of electrodes. This type of panel has inherent memory and does not use phosphors. A small amount of nitrogen is added to the neon to increase hysteresis. In color panels, the back of each cell is coated with a phosphor.
The ultraviolet photons emitted by the plasma excite these phosphors to give off colored light. The operation of each cell is thus comparable to that of a fluorescent lamp. Every pixel is made up of three separate sub pixel cells, each with different colored phosphors. One sub pixel has a red light phosphor, one sub pixel has a green light phosphor and one sub pixel has a blue light phosphor. These colors blend together to create the overall color of the pixel, analogous to the “triad” of a shadowmask CRT.
We’ll be covering the following topics in this tutorial:
Thin film electro-luminescent display
Electroluminescence is the result of radiative recombination of electrons and holes in a material (usually a semiconductor). The excited electrons release their energy as photons – light. Prior to recombination, electrons and holes are separated either as a result of doping of the material to form a p-n junction (in semiconductor electroluminescent devices such as LEDs), or through excitation by impact of high-energy electrons accelerated by a strong electric field (as with the phosphors in electroluminescent displays).
Powder phosphor-based electroluminescent panels are frequently used as backlights to liquid crystal displays. They readily provide a gentle, even illumination to the entire display while consuming relatively little electric power. They do, however, require relatively high voltage. Recently, blue, red and green emitting thin film electroluminescent materials have been developed that offer the potential for long life and full color electroluminescent displays. In either case, the EL material must be enclosed between two electrodes and at least one electrode must be transparent to allow the escape of the produced light.
Glass coated with indium oxide or tin oxide is commonly used as the front (transparent) electrode while the back electrode is or is coated with reflective metal. Additionally, other transparent conducting materials, such as carbon nanotubes coatings or PEDOT can be used as the front electrode. Unlike neon and fluorescent lamps, EL lamps are not negative resistance devices so no extra circuitry is needed to regulate the amount of current flowing through them. In principle, EL lamps can be made in any color. EL devices have low power consumption when compared with neon signs, and have a wide range of applications such as their use on advertising boards and safety signs.
Light-emitting diode ( LED )
A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor diode that emits incoherent narrow-spectrum light when electrically biased in the forward direction of the p-n junction. This effect is a form of electroluminescence. An LED is usually a small area source, often with extra optics added to the chip that shapes its radiation pattern. The color of the emitted light depends on the composition and condition of the semi conducting material used, and can be infrared, visible, or near-ultraviolet. An LED can be used as a regular household light source.
Like a normal diode, an LED consists of a chip of semi conducting material impregnated, or doped, with impurities to create a p-njunction. As in other diodes, current flows easily from the p-side, or anode, to the n-side, or cathode, but not in the reverse direction. Charge-carriers—electrons and holes—flow into the junction from electrodes with different voltages. When an electron meets a hole, it falls into a lower energy level, and releases energy in the form of a photon. The wavelength of the light emitted, and therefore its color, depends on the band gap energy of the materials forming the p-n junction.
In silicon or germanium diodes, the electrons and holes recombine by a non-radiative transition which produces no optical emission, because these are indirect band gap materials. The materials used for an LED have a direct band gap with energies corresponding to near-infrared, visible or near-ultraviolet light. LEDs are usually built on an n-type substrate, with an electrode attached to the ptype layer deposited on its surface.
P-type substrates, while less common, occur as well. Many commercial LEDs, especially GaN/InGaN, also use sapphire substrate. Substrates that are transparent to the emitted wavelength, and backed by a reflective layer, increase the LED efficiency. The refractive index of the package material should match the index of the semiconductor, otherwise the produced light gets partially reflected back into the semiconductor, where it may be absorbed and turned into additional heat, thus lowering the efficiency. An anti-reflection coating may be added as well.
Liquid Crystal Display (LCD)
An active matrix liquid crystal display (AMLCD) is a type of flat panel display, currently the overwhelming choice of notebook computer manufacturers, due to light weight, very good image quality, wide color gamut, and response time. The most common example of an active matrix display contains, besides the polarizing sheets and cells of liquid crystal, a matrix of thin-film transistors (TFTs) to make a TFT LCD.
Each pixel of an LCD typically consists of a layer of molecules aligned between two transparent electrodes, and two polarizing filters, the axes of transmission of which are (in most of the cases) perpendicular to each other. With no liquid crystal between the polarizing filters, light passing through the first filter would be blocked by the second (crossed) polarizer. The surface of the electrodes that are in contact with the liquid crystal material are treated so as to align the liquid crystal molecules in a particular direction. This treatment typically consists of a thin polymer layer that is unidirectionally rubbed using, for example, a cloth.
The direction of the liquid crystal alignment is then defined by the direction of rubbing. When a voltage is applied across the electrodes, a torque acts to align the liquid crystal molecules parallel to the electric field, distorting the helical. This reduces the rotation of the polarization of the incident light, and the device appears gray. If the applied voltage is large enough, the liquid crystal molecules in the center of the layer are almost completely untwisted and the polarization of the incident light is not rotated as it passes through the liquid crystal layer. This light will then be mainly polarized perpendicular to the second filter, and thus be blocked and the pixel will appear black.
By controlling the voltage applied across the liquid crystal layer in each pixel, light can be allowed to pass through in varying amounts thus constituting different levels of gray.Both the liquid crystal material and the alignment layer material contain ionic compounds. If an electric field of one particular polarity is applied for a long period of time, this ionic material is attracted to the surfaces and degrades the device performance.
This is avoided either by applying an alternating current or by reversing the polarity of the electric field as the device is addressed. When a large number of pixels is required in a display, it is not feasible to drive each directly since then each pixel would require independent electrodes. Instead, the display is multiplexed. In a multiplexed display, electrodes on one side of the display are grouped and wired together (typically in columns), and each group gets its own voltage source. On the other side, the electrodes are also grouped (typically in rows), with each group getting a voltage sink.
Dinesh Thakur holds an B.C.A, MCDBA, MCSD certifications. Dinesh authors the hugely popular