Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology (TMD) has a new 3.5" polysilicon LCD that has an optical touchscreen function, and it's pretty cool looking.

What's so great about an optical touchscreen? Conventional touchscreen technologies have required sensors to detect the pressure put o­n certain parts of the screen when pushed. That's all happy doing, but the conventional method of integrating touchscreen functionality requires the use of two screens, actually: o­ne pressure sensitive, and o­ne LCD.

Enter TMD's touchscreen with an optical sensor, taking away the need for the pressure sensitive part.

Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Corporation announced o­n the 9th that they have developed a 3.5" low temperature polysilicon LCD with an integrated touchscreen function.

TMD developed a LCD in April of 2003 that contained a scanner function. Because this new development, a growth from the previous o­ne, features an improved optical sensor sensitivity and more precise signal processor, TMD has said that it allows for quick reading and signal processing.

Although conventional touchpanels detect signals by pressure placed o­n the screen by touching, this newly developed product recognizes signals using an image sensor integrated with the LCD pixels themselves. Because there is no need for an external touchscreen membrane, the screen can be thinner, small, and more lightweight.

The predominant specifications of this new screen include a 320 x 240 dot (QVGA) resolution, 260,000 color display capability, and display refresh/reading data rate of 60Hz. It is targetted mainly at mobile devices, and TMD is planning for commercialization some time in 2005.



Inspired by:
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2004/1209/tmd.htm

Toshiba Matsushita Display Technology Corporation:
http://www.tmdisplay.com/