1.1 Historical Perspective

Electronic displays have, for many years, been the window to the world in television as well as the primary human interface to computers. In today's information society, they play an increasingly important and indispensable role in communication, computing, and entertainment devices.

The venerable cathode ray tube (CRT) has been around for more than 100 years and has been the workhorse for television displays and, until recently, for computer screens. As one of the few surviving electronic devices based on vacuum tubes, the CRT can boast an unrivaled success as a low-cost color display with good image quality. Its large depth, weight, and power consumption, however, have limited its use to nonportable applications.

From the early days of electronic display development, a flat panel display was considered a very attractive alternative to the bulky CRT. For decades, display engineers searched for flat panel display technologies to replace the CRT in many applications. In spite of many attempts to develop flat CRTs, plasma displays, and other low-profile displays, commercial success remained elusive for many years. Finally, by the 1990s several technologies were making significant inroads to achieve this goal. In particular, active matrix liquid crystal displays (AMLCDs) and plasma displays demonstrated large sizes and high image quality comparable to CRTs.

The success of AMLCDs, the subject of this book, is the culmination of two significant developments: liquid crystal cell technology and large-area microelectronics on glass. For more than two decades these technologies have been refined and an extensive infrastructure...