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SOLED

SOLED

The Universal Display Corporation (UDC) is one of the most prominent developers of Organic Light Emitting Devices (OLEDs). Working with researchers at Princeton University and the University of Southern California, it has produced several variations of the OLED designed to help it achieve its goal of developing multi-purpose flat screen monitors which can be wall, … Read more

Shadow Mask

Before the stream of electrons produced by the CRT’s cathode reach the phosphor coated faceplate, it encounters the shadow mask, a sheet of metal etched with a pattern of holes. The mask is positioned in the glass funnel of the CRT during manufacture and the phosphor is coated onto the screen so that electrons coming … Read more

Shading

flat shading

Objects in 3D scenes are most commonly created by fitting together a large number of polygons (usually triangles), edge to edge, creating a “wire-frame” which approximates the object’s surface. By drawing only those triangles which lie on surfaces visible to the viewer (known as “hidden line removal”), recognisable, though unrealistic, objects can be portrayed. There … Read more

SED

SED

FEDs have proved difficult to develop and many companies had dropped their development projects in favour of other technologies. One company, however, has been working on a variation of the FED which currently looks to be a good contender for commercial production due to its simplicity and lower production costs. The company is Canon and … Read more

Saddle-Saddle Yoke

saddle-saddle yoke

The most common form of deflection yoke used in early colour monitors is known as a saddle-toroidal yoke. Its name comes from the shapes of the vertical and horizontal deflection electro-magnets’ windings. The winding of the electro-magnet used for vertical beam deflection is saddle shaped, while the one responsible for horizontal deflection takes the form … Read more

Ray Tracing

Effective as they can be at producing recognisable 3D scenes, Gouraud and Phong shading will never produce anything that could be described as photo-realistic. To achieve this, it’s necessary to use rendering techniques that mimic the physics of real-world lighting. The most commonly used of these are called “ray tracing” and “radiosity“. Ray tracing is … Read more

Radiosity

Ray tracing mimics the reflection and refraction of light rays in a 3D scene to produce image detail surpassing anything possible using Phong shading. Effective as it is, though, ray tracing by itself will not produce photo-realistic images. At the very minimum, some kind of ambient lighting must be applied to the scene to reduce … Read more

Polysilicon

Most silicon chips are made of single crystal silicon, which has a very low resistance to electron flow. However, silicon can exist in different forms (just as carbon can exist in the form of diamond, graphite, soot and buckminsterfullerine). As well as single crystal silicon, other forms are Poly-silicon and Amorphous silicon. Polysilicon (p-si) is … Read more

Point Sampling

texture filtering

MIP-maps are used to store several different copies of a texture, at different scales, for use in 3D scene rendering. One of the accompanying illustrations shows four versions of a texture applied to flat surfaces which were parallel to the screen, each surface covered by a single, unprocessed, copy of one of the textures stored … Read more

Plasma Display

plasma display

In the search for a large sized flat screen display technology, LCDs do not have the field all to themselves. Though late to join the commercial battle, the next flat large screen devices being commercialised are plasma display panels (PDPs), a technology developed from the principle of the fluorescent (or “strip”) light. In a fluorescent … Read more

OLED

OLED

In light emitting diodes (LEDs) based on inorganic light emitting materials, some of the photons released by the inorganic materials are also reabsorbed by them. In organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), which produce light using the same electron/hole recombination method as LEDs, the frequencies of light absorbed by the light emitting materials lie mostly outside … Read more