Sixteen-segment display

A sixteen-segment display (SISD) is a type of display based on 16 segments that can be turned on or off according to the graphic pattern to be produced. It is an extension of the more common seven-segment display, adding four diagonal and two vertical segments and splitting the three horizontal segments in half. Other variants include the fourteen-segment display which does not split the top or bottom horizontal segments, and the twenty two-segment display that allows lower-case characters with descenders.

Often a character generator is used to translate 7-bit ASCII character codes to the 16 bits that indicate which of the 16 segments to turn on or off.

Sixteen-segment displays were originally designed to display alphanumeric characters (Latin letters and Arabic digits). Later they were used to display Thai numerals and Persian characters. Non-electronic displays using this pattern existed as early as 1902.

Before the advent of inexpensive dot-matrix displays, sixteen and fourteen-segment displays were some of the few options available for producing alphanumeric characters on calculators and other embedded systems. However, they are still^[update] sometimes used on VCRs, car stereos, microwave ovens, telephone Caller ID displays, and slot machine readouts.

Sixteen-segment displays may be based on one of several technologies, the three most common optoelectronics types being LED, LCD and VFD. The LED variant is typically manufactured in single or dual character packages, to be combined as needed into text line displays of a suitable length for the application in question.

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