New Driver Could Lead to Brighter, Cheaper LCDs

Stella Kao

Prime View International Co., Ltd., of Taiwan has developed an LCD driving method that can crank sharp and crisp color images out of a thin-film transistor (TFT) LCD. Called the Integrated Driving Technology, this new driving method will give TFT LCDs higher resolution than other active-matrix LCDs, the company claims.

"We are the first in the world to offer such an advanced technology," says Dyi-Chung Hu, senior director of R&D and the LCM manufacturing division at Prime View. The new driving technology ha s received patents in the U.S., Australia, and Taiwan, and is patent-pending in Japan and the EC.

The Integrated Driving Technology will lower the cos t of the LCDs by drastically reducing the number of driver ICs. Hu explains that in conventional active-matrix TFT LCDs, higher resolution has to be addressed by more individual pixels, resulting in a greater number of driver ICs.

For a Japan-made 5.4-inch TFT LCD, it requires six ICs -- two 120-pixel I/O scan-driver ICs and four 240-pixel I/O data-driver ICs -- to drive pixels to create a full-color display. However, using Prime View's Integrated Driving Technology circuitry design, you can achieve a full-color, video-rate display with only one 240-pixel I/O data-driver IC.

Prime View's latest 1.8-inch TFT LCD module using the technology has a high resolution of 234 by 480 pixels, compared to standard 220- by 279-pixel resolution supported by the existing 1.8-inch models. It will let digital camera users obtain all the detailed images for back-panel review and replay.

The LCD module also applies an advanced chip on glass (COG) mainstream technology, which directly mounts the driver LSI onto the glass of the LCD and thus produces a thin LCD panel. Compared with the currently used tape-automated-bonding (TAB) technology, the COG process cost is lower and the process yield rate and reliability are higher.

"We are seeing more and more consumer and small industrial products incorporate specialized LCD panels. Almost all of the next generation of digital cameras will include LCDs," Hu says.