Samsung Electronics claims to have produced the first LCD panel that shows independent images on each side of a mobile LCD display.
The double-sided LCD can show two different pictures simultaneously on the front and back of the same screen. According to Samsung, other conventional double-sided LCDs can only show a reverse image of the same video data.
The potential of the double-sided LCD, said Samsung, is that it has the potential to replace two display panels with one, thereby reducing overall thickness of mobile products by at least 1mm.
“We anticipate high demand when we commence mass production in the first half of 2007,” said Samsung executive v-p Yun Jin-hyuk.
The LCD is based on a double-gate, thin-film transistor (TFT) architecture, which converts voltages at the pixel level to control the liquid crystal alignment needed to reproduce on-screen images.
The double-sided LCD has two gates that operate each pixel instead of one, so the screen on the front can display different images than the one on the back. The double-sided display makes use of a proprietary amorphous silicon gate technology, which accommodates the increased number of TFT gates without increasing the size of the driver integrated circuits.
The LCD is 2.6mm thick with QVGA (240 x 320 pixel) resolution, and has brightness values of 250 nits for the front and 100 nits for the rear display.