Tokyo--Optrex Corporation, the world famous liquid crystal display (LCD) module manufacturer, and Samsung Electronics Corporation and Toshiba Corporation, two of the leading companies in the world semiconductor industry, today announced that they will jointly develop driver LSIs for color super twisted nematic (STN) LCDs for mobile products, particularly next-generation cellular phones.

i-mode, the NTT DoCoMo cellular phone service supporting direct Internet connection, has enjoyed immense success since its February 1998 launch. Its continued market penetration, and the emergence of W-CDMA services, is spurring demand for larger displays supporting color. In addition to a sharp, high resolution image, such displays must make the lowest possible demands on battery power, a requirement favoring STN displays over thin film transistor LCDs.

All three companies bring distinctive strengths to the co-development announced today: Optrex has world-class know-how in LCD modules, including low-power Multi-Line Addressing (MLA) technology; Samsung will provide a segment driver LSI incorporating an SRAM; and Toshiba will contribute a common driver linking to company's endurance technology for high voltage.

The development of LSIs will be completed in May 2000 and volume production will start from September 2000. The samples for general users will be available after a certain month of Optrex's product launch.

Outline of New Driver LSIs

• Support for 128RGB (segment) x 168dot matrix (common) and 256-colors display - 8 gray-scales for each Red and Green/ 4 gray-scales for Blue
• Low power consumption, enhanced contrast and high-speed display switching are realized by MLA.
• Integrating power supply circuit, gray-scale control circuit, and high density static random access memory (SRAM)- the segment driver integrates 196.608kbit RAM and the common driver adopts output voltage temperature coefficient technology.
• Wide selection of gray-scales
  Pulse gray-scale: fixed pallet
  Pulse gray-scale: full pallet
  Frame Rate Control (FRC): fixed pallet
  

Specification