Mobile displays reach silly resolutions

OVER THE PAST year, it has become fairly common to see VGA resolution displays in high-end PDAs, such as the Dell X51v (a 3.7 incher) and Fujitsu Loox C550 (3.5"). These screens already look pretty impressive when you see them up close, however the next generation are ready to eclipse this.

LG has been demonstrating a 2.4" model at a sort of VGA resolution, using a Sub-Pixel Rending kludge to achieve this. However, at the recent SID conference in San Francisco, TPO (formerly Toppoly & Philips) were taking full advantage of LTPS manufacturing to take the screen size right down, and were demonstrating an incredible 2.0" VGA (640x480) with no such tricks.

LTPS uses a laser beam to anneal the silicon of the glass, creating fine polysilicon rather than the more common, and coarse, amorphous silicon. In a nutshell this allows them to make smaller transistors on the glass, which allows more light through and hence smaller pixels.

If you were to make a 19" TFT using the same sized pixels as the 2.0" display, then it would have a whopping resolution of 6080 x 4560 - you'd need quite a bit more than a Quad SLI rig to play games at that resolution!

Likewise, one of the biggest problems for handheld manufacturers is the increased processing power that you need to drive these screens with anything approximating good performance. TomTom have come under some criticism for the relative sluggishness of their widescreen GPS system, and that's only 480x272 (WQVGA).

The problem lies in the fact that display controllers built into most mobile chips have really only been any good up to 320x240, usually having a slow 32-bit memory bus that is shared with the main system RAM, so this is falling right into the hands of nVidia and ATI who are rubbing their hands in delight at the prospect of sales of millions of discrete graphics accelerators.

While the 2.0” is not a production item yet, 2.8", 2.6" and 2.4" VGA products are very close, so you can expect to see them making their way into smartphones near you soon, and 2.2” will follow early next year.

The other beneficiary of this technology surely has to be opticians, who may well find their business going through the roof as we all start trying to read 1mm high text! µ