Citizen develops ferroelectric LCD

[Alexander Turcic]

Japanese Tech-On has a story that Citizen Watch has developed a ferroelectric liquid crystal display that might as well fall into the category of e-paper technologies. Like E Ink it's bi-stable (doesn't require power to maintain its state), shines with a high contrast and can be viewed at a wide angle. In fact ferroelectric LCDs have been around for many years, but they used to be very difficult to manufacture, and were therefore expensive.

This display secures the memory property by reducing the distance between two glass substrates to about 1.7 μm, 1/3 that of standard LCD panels, using the ferroelectric liquid crystal and inorganic oriented film with liquid crystal molecules and the film tilted by around 20 degrees. Drive voltage is a low 5 V. If the display is refreshed every 10 seconds, the LCD uses only 1/50 the power needed to drive a standard TFT LCD panel. It uses a passive-matrix configuration drive, which is well suited to display precise images. The LCD can be either reflective or transmissive, but the company plans to manufacture the reflective type over the short-term in order to make the most of its low power consumption property. Citizen also considers it may be able to make the LCD flexible to a certain degree by switching the substrate material to plastic.

From the article: "Citizen plans to use the ferroelectric LCD as the LCD panel of its diver watch to be released in or after August 2006" and "[the] LCD maintains the screen display even when the power is cut off".

So if the watch runs out of power, it keeps feeding you the wrong information? <sarcasm heavy>Man, I feel safer already!</sarcasm>

[doctorow]

LOL! You know for some people this technology is the perfect excuse for coming too late to a date