UCF researchers discover addressable single pixel full-color display tech
As we all know, current LCD technology creates colors by using mulitple single color sub-pixels to create the full gamut resolved through the pixel. This method would consolidate the heavy lifting into a single voltage controled pixel – reducing the required footprint per-pixel significantly.
Gizmodo has a brief high-level writeup.
A research team at the University of Central Florida has developed a new surface that allows the tuning of individual subpixels on a display. The breakthrough might mean the potential display resolutions on LCD TVs could triple, virtually overnight.
All the details can be found at Nature.
Dynamic, colour-changing surfaces have many applications including displays, wearables and active camouflage. Plasmonic nanostructures can fill this role by having the advantages of ultra-small pixels, high reflectivity and post-fabrication tuning through control of the surrounding media. However, previous reports of post-fabrication tuning have yet to cover a full red-green-blue (RGB) colour basis set with a single nanostructure of singular dimensions. Here, we report a method which greatly advances this tuning and demonstrates a liquid crystal-plasmonic system that covers the full RGB colour basis set, only as a function of voltage. This is accomplished through a surface morphology-induced, polarization-dependent plasmonic resonance and a combination of bulk and surface liquid crystal effects that manifest at different voltages. We further demonstrate the system’s compatibility with existing LCD technology by integrating it with a commercially available thin-film-transistor array. The imprinted surface interfaces readily with computers to display images as well as video.
Thanks to Curt Wilber for the tip.