NEC develops heart shaped TFT LCD modules

TOKYO, JAPAN & SANTA CLARA, USA: NEC LCD Technologies, together with its sales and marketing channel in the Americas, NEC Electronics America Inc., has successfully developed a manufacturing technology that enables more flexible design of thin-film transistor (TFT) LCD panels.

The prototype design, a 'heart-shaped,' low-temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) color TFT LCD module formed using two half-circular arcs and two straight lines, has a display width of 4cm, height of 3.6cm and pixel pitch of 174micrometers (146 pixels/inch).

NEC LCD Technologies' new technology enables optimal arrangement of gate and data lines in the pixel array and minimizes the overlaps between gate and data driver circuitry, when the module is non-rectangular in shape.

By applying its proprietary value-integrated TFT (VIT) technology and integrating the driver circuits into the module along the perimeter of the LCD glass, NEC LCD Technologies has simplified the interconnection scheme and substantially reduced the area needed to contain the wiring and interconnections between external circuits, thereby yielding a bezel as slim as 2mm.

Traditional display modules are rectangular in shape, since it is the simplest, most efficient and versatile shape for accommodating the pixel arrays. Recently LCD suppliers have started to introduce fairly simple non-rectangular LCD shapes, including circles, ellipses and rectangles with trimmed corners.

The shapes have been fairly simple because the more complex the shape, the more difficult it is to accommodate the wiring patterns, resulting in thicker bezels and greater consumption of power. Displays with non-rectangular shapes are generally targeted to replace mechanical instrument gauges-such as the speedometers and tachometers found in cars-and other applications that require simple shapes.

NEC LCD Technologies' new technology enables LCD modules to be designed with varied, more flexible shapes that can be adapted to embedded applications and also to nontraditional LCD applications. NEC LCD Technologies believes this development will stimulate the development of new and unique LCD applications.