Hardware Devices

Display Hardware
• Video display devices
• Hard-copy devices
Input devices
• Locator Devices
• Keyboard devices
• Valuator Devices
• Choice Devices

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Display Technologies
Cathode Ray Tubes (CRTs)
– Most common display device today
– Evacuated glass bottle
– Extremely high voltage
– Heating element (filament)
– Electrons pulled towards
anode focusing cylinder
– Vertical and horizontal deflection plates
– Beam strikes phosphor coating on front of tube

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Electron Gun
• Contains a filament that, when heated, emits a stream
of electrons
• Electrons are focused with an electromagnet into a
sharp beam and directed to a specific point of the face of
the picture tube
• The front surface of the picture tube is coated with
small phosphor dots
• When the beam hits a phosphor dot it glows with a
brightness proportional to the strength of the beam and
how often it is excited by the beam
•The picture is repeatedly repainted (refresh CRT)
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CRT Monitor
CRT

Shadow Mask

Electron Guns

Red Input

Green
Input

Blue Input

Deflection
Yoke Red, Blue,
and Green
Phosphor Dots

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CRT properties
1. Persistence
2. Resolution
3. Addressability
4. Aspect ratio

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Persistence
How long small spots continue to emit light after the
beam is moved. How long it takes to the emitted light
from the screen to decay to one-tenth of its original
intensity.
– Lower persistence requires high refresh rate & it is
good for animation
– High persistence is useful for displaying highly
complex static picture.
– Graphics monitors are usually constructed with 10 to
60 microseconds.

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 Resolution

Intensity distribution

• Resolution is the number of pointes per inch or centimeter

that can be plotted horizontally & vertically.
• The smaller the spot size, the higher the resolution.
• The higher the resolution, the better is the graphics system
• High quality resolution is 1280x1024
• The intensity distribution of spots on the screen have
Gaussian shape.
• Adjacent points will appear distinct as long as their
separation is greater than the diameter at which each spot
has intensity of about 60% of that at the center of the spot.
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 Addressability

• Addressability is a measure of the spacing

between the centers of vertical and
horizontal lines.
• The picture on a screen consists of intensified
points.
• The smallest addressable point on the screen
is called pixel or picture element
• In graphics mode there are 800x600
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Aspect ratio
This number gives the ratio between vertical points and
horizontal points necessary to produce equal length lines
in both directions on the screen. Aspect ratio = ¾ means:
vertical line with 3 points is equal in length to horizontal
line of 4 points.

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Display Technologies: CRTs
1. Vector Displays
2. Raster Scan Displays
3. Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs)
4. Plasma Panel
5. Organic LED Arrays

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Vector Displays

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Vector Displays or random scan
display
– The electron beam is directed only to the parts of the
screen where a picture is to be drawn.
– Like plotters it draws a picture one line at a time
– Used in line drawing and wireframe displays
– Picture definition is stored as a set of line-drawing
commands stored in a refresh display file.
– Refresh rate depends on number of lines
– Refresh cycle is 30 to 60 times each second
– Capable of drawing 100,000 short lines at this refresh rate

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Vector Displays
– Advantages:
• Generates higher resolution than other
systems (Raster)
• Produces smooth line drawings
– Disadvantage: Is not used for realistic shaded
scenes

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Raster Scan Displays (1)
– Raster: A rectangular array of points or dots
– Pixel: One dot or picture element of the raster. Its
intensity range for pixels depends on capability of the
system
– Scan line: A row of pixels
– Picture elements are stored in a memory called frame
buffer

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Raster Scan Displays (2)

– Frame must be “refreshed” to draw new images

– As new pixels are struck by electron beam, others
are decaying
– Electron beam must hit all pixels frequently to
eliminate flicker
– Critical fusion ‫ندماج‬K‫ ا‬frequency
• Typically 60 times/sec
• Varies with intensity, individuals, phospher
persistence, lighting...

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Raster Scan Displays (3)
– Intensity of pixels depends on the system for
example black and white screens each point can
be on or off thus it needs one bit of memory to
represent each pixel.
– To paint color screen additional bits are needed.
If three bits are used, then number of different
colors are 2*2*2.
– A special memory is used to store the image with
scan-out synchronous to the raster. We call this
the frame buffer.
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Raster Scan Displays (4)

– Interlaced Scanning
– Assume can only scan 30 times / second
– To reduce flicker, divide frame into two “fields” of
odd and even lines

1/30 Sec 1/30 Sec

1/60 Sec 1/60 Sec 1/60 Sec 1/60 Sec
Field 1 Field 2 Field 1 Field 2
Frame Frame

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Raster Scan Displays (5)
Scanning (left to right, top to bottom)
– Vertical Sync Pulse: Signals the start of the next field
– Vertical Retrace: Time needed to get from the bottom
of the current field to the top of the next field
– Horizontal Sync Pulse: Signals the start of the new
scan line
– Horizontal Retrace: The time needed to get from the
end of the current scan line to the start of the next
scan line

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Raster Scan Displays (6)
Raster CRT pros:
– Allows solids, not just wire frames
– Leverages low-cost CRT technology (i.e., TVs)
– Bright! Display emits light
Cons:
– Requires screen-size memory array
– Discreet sampling (pixels)
– Practical limit on size

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 Frame
Buffers

• A frame buffer may be thought of as computer memory

organized as a two-dimensional array with each (x,y) addressable
location corresponding to one pixel.
• Bit Planes or Bit Depth is the number of bits corresponding to
each pixel.
• A typical frame buffer resolution might be
– 640 x 480 x 8
– 1280 x 1024 x 8
– 1280 x 1024 x 24 20
Monochrome Display
(Bit-map Display)

1 bit
2 levels

Electron
Gun

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3-Bit Color Display
3

red

green
blue

COLOR: black red green blue yellow cyan magenta white

R 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1
G 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1
B 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1

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True Color Display
24 bit planes, 8 bits per color gun.
224 = 16,777,216
N

N Red

Green

Blue

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Color Map Look-Up Tables
Extends the number of colors that can be displayed by a given number of bit-planes.

y RED
max
GREEN
255
BLUE
1
1
0
y 0
0 67 Pixel displayed
0
1 1001 1010 0001
0
67 100110100001 at x', y'
R G B
Pixel in
bit map 0
0 at x', y'
0 x x
max

Bit map Look-up table Display

Video look-up table organization: each table entry is a 12 bit per entry.
A pixel with value 67 is displayed on the screen with the red electron gun
at 9/15 (binary 1001) of maximum, green at 10/15, and the blue is 1/15.
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 Beam penetration
• Used with random scan monitors
• The screen has two layers of phosphor: usually red and
green
• The displayed color depends on how far the electron
beam penetrate through the two layers.
• A beam of slow electrons excites only the outer of the red
layer, a beam of fast electrons penetrates through the red
layer and excites the inner green layer, and at
intermediate beam speeds, combinations of the two
colors are emitted to show other colors (yellow & orange)

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Display Technology: Color CRTs

Color CRTs have

– Three electron guns
– A metal shadow mask to differentiate the beams

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Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs)

– LCDs: organic molecules, naturally in crystalline

state, that liquefy when excited by heat or E field
– Crystalline state twists polarized light 90º.

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Display Technology: LCDs
Transmissive & reflective LCDs:
– LCDs act as light valves, not light emitters, and
thus rely on an external light source.
– Laptop screen: backlit, transmissive display
– Palm Pilot/Game Boy: reflective display

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Plasma Panel
Plasma display panels
– Similar in principle to
fluorescent light tubes
– Small gas-filled capsules
are excited by electric field,
emits UV light
– UV excites phosphor
– Phosphor relaxes, emits
some other color

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Plasma Panel (2)
Plasma Display Panel Pros
– Large viewing angle
– Good for large-format displays
– Fairly bright
Cons
– Expensive
– Large pixels (~1 mm versus ~0.2 mm)
– Phosphors gradually deplete
– Less bright than CRTs, using more power

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Display Technology: DMD / DLP
Digital Micromirror Devices (projectors) or Digital Light
Processing
Microelectromechanical (MEM) devices, fabricated with
VLSI techniques

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Organic LED Arrays
• Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) Arrays
– The display of the future? Many think so.
– OLEDs function like regular semiconductor LEDs
– But they emit light
• Thin-film deposition of organic, light-emitting
molecules through vapor sublimation in a
vacuum.
• Dope emissive layers with fluorescent
molecules to create color.

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Organic LED Arrays
OLED pros:
– Transparent
– Flexible
– Light-emitting, and quite bright (daylight visible)
– Large viewing angle
– Fast (< 1 microsecond off-on-off)
– Can be made large or small
– Available for cell phones and car stereos
OLED cons:
– Not very robust, display lifetime a key issue
– Currently only passive matrix displays
• Passive matrix: Pixels are illuminated in scanline order, but the
lack of phospherescence causes flicker
• Active matrix: A polysilicate layer provides thin film transistors
at each pixel, allowing direct pixel access and constant illum.

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Display Processor
• Also called either a Graphics Controller or Display
CoProcessor

• Specialized hardware to assist in scan converting output

primitives into the frame buffer.

• Fundamental difference among display systems is how

much the display processor does versus how much
must be done by the graphics subroutine package
executing on the general-purpose CPU.

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Video
Controller
Cycles through the frame buffer, one scan line at a time. Contents of the memory are
used the control the CRT's beam intensity or color.

X address Set or increment

Horizontal
M Linear Raster scan
and vertical
e address generator
deflection
m
Y address Set or decrement signals
o
r
y

Data Pixel Intensity

value(s) or color

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Hard-copy devices
ο Ink-jet printer
ο Laser printer
ο Film recorder
ο Electrostatic printer
ο Pen plotter

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Input
Devices
• Locator Devices:
– to indicate a position and/or orientation
– to select a displayed entity
– Tablet, Mouse, Trackball, Joystick, Touch Panel, Light Pen
• Keyboard devices:
– to input a character string
– Alphanumeric keyboard (coded - get single ASCII character,
unencoded - get state of all keys - more flexible)
• Valuator Devices:
– to input a single value in the space of real numbers
– Rotary dials (Bounded or Unbounded), Linear sliders
• Choice Devices:
– to select from a set of possible actions or choices
– Function keys

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