Experts from Samsung Display Co Ltd, a division of the famous Korean company Samsung, have developed and produced prototypes of a new liquid-crystal display, which has the highest resolution to date, equal to 2,250 dots per inch. This is the resolution required for modern holographic, augmented and virtual reality technologies, where images on the display are increased by means of optical lenses.
The prototype of the new display has a size of 1.96 inches horizontally, and its resolution, meanwhile, already meets the standard 4K (3840 by 2160 pixels). Samsung specialists used in the new display instead of the traditional silicon base of special glass, which will allow in the future to produce a panel of sufficiently large size. The electronic circuit that controls the operation of each display pixel is based on low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (low-temperature polycrystalline Si, LTPS). The subpixel and single pixel sizes are 3.76 and 11.28 micrometers, respectively.
Obtaining such high resolution is associated with the problems of reducing the size of each pixel and eliminating the mutual influence of neighboring pixels. To solve these problems, Samsung specialists developed and used three new technologies. The first of these technologies is the original arrangement (alignment) of pixels relative to each other. In this arrangement, called the “stagger type”, three sub-pixels of red, green and blue are formed in the shape of a triangle.
The second trick to achieve ultra-high resolution was to reduce the length of the TFT channel by 25 percent. And the most important part of all of this was the process that was developed to form 1-micrometer contact holes, 4-micrometer color filters and other ultra-miniature display structure elements.
As we have mentioned above, ultra-high resolution displays could be used to produce three dimensional holographic images. For this purpose it is necessary that the size of a holographic display of a smartphone, for example, should be not less than 5 inches diagonally. And taking into account the scalability of this technology, the appearance of holographic smartphones should be expected in the not so distant future.
