Present and future trend of electron device technology in flat panel display

The state of the art of the direct matrix and active matrix displays and requirements on their driver devices are reviewed. The future trends of the flat panel displays and related electron devices are discussed. It is noted that flat panel displays are becoming key devices in compact or large-screen television and information systems such as compact compute terminals. The plasma display panel (PDP), electroluminescence display (EL), and liquid crystal display (LCD) are being developed actively. Monochrome PDP and EL have attained large information contents earlier than LCD, and were applied to laptop computers. However, LCD has recently been remarkably improved in its properties. The development of active matrix LCD has started recently. The latter has a diode or thin film transistor (TFT) in each picture element and has high color image quality.<>