Toshiba, Optrex, Samsung to Co-develop Color STN LCD Driver LSIs for Cellular Phones

Toshiba Corp.. (Tokyo), Samsung Electronics Corp. (Seoul, Korea), and <%=company%> (Tokyo) will jointly develop driver LSIs for color super twisted nematic (STN) LCDs for mobile products, particularly next-generation cellular phones. i-mode, the NTT DoCoMo cellular phone service supporting direct Internet connection, has been successful since its February 1998 launch. In addition to a sharp, high resolution image, such displays must make the lowest possible demands on battery power, a requirement favoring STN displays over thin film transistor LCDs.

Optrex has know-how in LCD modules, including low-power Multi-Line Addressing (MLA) technology; Samsung will provide a segment driver LSI incorporating an SRAM; and Toshiba will contribute a common driver linking to company's endurance technology for high voltage.

The development of LSIs will be completed in May 2000 and volume production will start from September 2000. The samples for general users will be available after a certain month of Optrex's product launch. Outline of New Driver LSIs Support for 128RGB (segment) x 168dot matrix (common) and 256-colors display—eight gray-scales for each Red and Green/ four gray-scales for Blue Low power consumption, enhanced contrast, and high-speed display switching are realized by MLA.

Integrating power supply circuit, gray-scale control circuit, and high-density static random access memory (SRAM)—the segment driver integrates 196.608kbit RAM and the common driver adopts output voltage temperature coefficient technology.

Edited by Kristin Keiser