Bernard J. Lechner

Bernard J. Lechner (25 January 1932 – 11 April 2014) was an electronics engineer and formerly Vice President, RCA Laboratories, where he worked for 30 years covering various aspects of television and information display technologies.

Lechner was born in New York City, NY, in 1932. He grew up and attended High School in New Rochelle, NY. According to his oral history recollections, he was already very interested in radio and TV receivers during his high school years. He built sets with commercially available kits.

Then, he studied electrical engineering at the Columbia University in New York City, interrupted by two years service for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the US and Germany. He received the B.S.E.E. degree in 1957.

In 1957, he joined the RCA Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, as Member of Technical Staff and worked on various aspects of video engineering such as a home video tape recorder, two-way cable TV services (pay-TV and interactive shopping), TV tuners and TV broadcast cameras. He headed various RCA research groups working on these developments.

While already working at RCA, he did graduate work at Princeton University and at the Harvard School of Business.

Bernie died on April 11, 2014.

George H. Heilmeier, who had joined the RCA Laboratories a year after Lechner, started working with liquid crystals in 1964. A team led by Heilmeier developed the first liquid crystal displays (LCD). Lechner joined the efforts with the intention of applying LCDs to TV screens. For this purpose, Lechner’s team studied simple matrix LCDs with a few lines and columns. It became obvious that there were tight limitations for the number of picture elements (pixels) addressable by a direct-drive addressing scheme (passive matrix addressing) due to the limited contrast and response speed. Lechner was first to apply a sample-and-hold technique to this type of display by connecting an electric capacity in parallel to each LCD pixel and controlling its charge through a field-effect transistor. Later-on, this technique was called active matrix addressing employing thin-film transistors (TFT). It helped, that the semiconductor operation of RCA was among the leaders of MOS-FET developments (CMOS 4000 series). At a press conference at RCA Headquarters in New York, a demonstration of such an LC matrix display with 36 pixels, using discrete components, took place in 1968 and showed the feasibility of the concept for TV panels. A corresponding publication followed in 1969.

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