Thin film transistor liquid crystal display

A thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT LCD) is a variant of a liquid-crystal display (LCD) that uses thin-film transistor (TFT) technology to improve image qualities such as addressability and contrast. A TFT LCD is an active-matrix LCD, in contrast to passive-matrix LCDs or simple, direct-driven LCDs with a few segments.

TFT LCDs are used in appliances including television sets, computer monitors, mobile phones, handheld video game systems, personal digital assistants, navigation systems and projectors.

TFT LCDs are also used in car instrument clusters because they allow the driver to customize the cluster, as well as being able to provide a skeuomorphic, analog-like display with digital elements.

Sharp invented color TFT LCD displays in 1986. In 1988, Sharp demonstrated a 14-inch, active-matrix, full-color, full-motion TFT LCD display. This led to Japan launching an LCD industry, which developed large-size LCD displays, including TFT computer monitors and LCD televisions. In the late 1990s, the LCD industry began shifting away from Japan, towards South Korea and Taiwan.

The liquid crystal displays used in calculators and other devices with similarly simple displays have direct-driven image elements, and therefore a voltage can be easily applied across just one segment of these types of displays without interfering with the other segments. This would be impractical for a large display, because it would have a large number of (color) picture elements (pixels), and thus it would require millions of connections, both top and bottom for each one of the three colors (red, green and blue) of every pixel. To avoid this issue, the pixels are addressed in rows and columns, reducing the connection count from millions down to thousands. The column and row wires attach to transistor switches, one for each pixel. The one-way current passing characteristic of the transistor prevents the charge that is being applied to each pixel from being drained between refreshes to a display's image. Each pixel is a small capacitor with a layer of insulating liquid crystal sandwiched between transparent conductive ITO layers.

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