Design considerations of smart displays

Flat panel display (FPD) technology is changing the rules governing the circuitry leading up to the display. This presents some problems, but also some opportunities to deliver images to the display in fundamentally different and possibly more efficient way than what is being done in a CRT dominated display world. The fact that matrix addressed FPDs require a sampled, usually digital signal dictates a different input approach. At the same time, the advantageous cost, performance and availability developments in memory and processing power drastically expand the choices of image data manipulation on the display. The capabilities of frame store memory and image compression-decompression affect the choices as to where we partition these functions as being on the display or in the system. The FPD provides a significant open area behind the display, which is very attractive as a place to integrate display functions. Several new display designs and materials seem to be ideal for this integration and for solving the problem of how to get the data from the processors on the back to the display on the front. The development of a smart display architecture will further impact designs such as a tiled display for very large, very high resolution images. In this case, each tile can be smart enough to render or decompress its part of the total image