Milestone-Proposal:Sharp 14-inch thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT-LCD) for TV, which has ushered in TFT LCD industry

Docket #:2013-04

This proposal has been submitted for review.

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Is the achievement you are proposing more than 25 years old? Yes

Is the achievement you are proposing within IEEE’s fields of interest? (e.g. “the theory and practice of electrical, electronics, communications and computer engineering, as well as computer science, the allied branches of engineering and the related arts and sciences” – from the IEEE Constitution) Yes

Did the achievement provide a meaningful benefit for humanity? Yes

Was it of at least regional importance? Yes

Has an IEEE Organizational Unit agreed to pay for the milestone plaque(s)? Yes

Has an IEEE Organizational Unit agreed to arrange the dedication ceremony? Yes

Has the IEEE Section in which the milestone is located agreed to take responsibility for the plaque after it is dedicated? Yes

Has the owner of the site agreed to have it designated as an Electrical Engineering Milestone? Yes

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Year or range of years in which the achievement occurred:

1987-1988

Title of the proposed milestone:

Sharp 14-inch thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT-LCD) for TV, 1988

Plaque citation summarizing the achievement and its significance:

Sharp demonstrated a 14-in. TFT-LCD for TV in 1988 when the display sizes of the mass-produced TFT-LCD and CRT TVs in the largest number were 3-in. and 14-in. respectively. The breathtakingly high display quality in CRT-size convinced vacillating electronic companies to decide to join the burgeoning TFT-LCD industry, vaulting it to the major league status in emerging full-color portable PCs, and replaced CRTs in TVs about 2 decades later.

In what IEEE section(s) does it reside?

IEEE Kansai Section

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) which have agreed to sponsor the Milestone:

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) paying for milestone plaque(s):

Unit: IEEE Kansai Section
Senior Officer Name: Senior officer name masked to public

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) arranging the dedication ceremony:

Unit: IEEE Kansai Section
Senior Officer Name: Senior officer name masked to public

IEEE section(s) monitoring the plaque(s):

IEEE Section: IEEE Kansai Section
IEEE Section Chair name: Section chair name masked to public

Milestone proposer(s):

Proposer name: Proposer's name masked to public
Proposer email: Proposer's email masked to public

Please note: your email address and contact information will be masked on the website for privacy reasons. Only IEEE History Center Staff will be able to view the email address.

Street address(es) and GPS coordinates of the intended milestone plaque site(s):

2613-1 Ichinomoto-cho, Tenri, Nara 632-8567 Japan

Describe briefly the intended site(s) of the milestone plaque(s). The intended site(s) must have a direct connection with the achievement (e.g. where developed, invented, tested, demonstrated, installed, or operated, etc.). A museum where a device or example of the technology is displayed, or the university where the inventor studied, are not, in themselves, sufficient connection for a milestone plaque.

Please give the address(es) of the plaque site(s) (GPS coordinates if you have them). Also please give the details of the mounting, i.e. on the outside of the building, in the ground floor entrance hall, on a plinth on the grounds, etc. If visitors to the plaque site will need to go through security, or make an appointment, please give the contact information visitors will need.

Sharp Technology Innovation Museum, R&D Group, Sharp Corporation

Are the original buildings extant?

Yes

Details of the plaque mounting:

The milestone plaque is to be kept in Sharp Technology Innovation Museum, and shown to the public along with other milestones of Sharp business activities of a 100 year history. Sharp Technology Innovation Museum is located in the premise of Sharp Technology Center where LCD research was started and culminated in mass-producing the woｒld-first mini-calculator mounted with LCD and C-MOS logic : the calculator is displayed at the British Science Museum.

How is the site protected/secured, and in what ways is it accessible to the public?

Public visitors have to go through security, have to wear ID cards in the museum.

Appointment has to be made to visit the site.

The appointment contact: +81-743-65-0011

                        http://www.sharp.co.jp/corporate/showroom/tenri/index.html

Who is the present owner of the site(s)?

Sharp Technology Innovation Museum, R&D Group, Sharp Corporation

A letter in English, or with English translation, from the site owner(s) giving permission to place IEEE milestone plaque on the property:

File:130209 IEEE History 130208 14in TFT-LCD Milestone Sharp Fukushima enc.pdf

A letter or email from the appropriate Section Chair supporting the Milestone application:

File:20130216 Endorsement of Milestone Proposal Sharp 14-inch TFT-LCD enc.pdf

What is the historical significance of the work (its technological, scientific, or social importance)?

It showed that an ideal display, namely, a flat, low-power, light-weight, CRT-sized full-color video display ,which could be used also in high ambient light, is technically feasible, and that is exactly what had been long waited for to be used in an emerging information age since LCD was press-released in 1968 by RCA. Technologically, it showed : 1. a-Si-TFT could be used for CRT size display. 2. Color TFT-LCD could maintain good display quality even in an high ambient light. 3. A large mother glass scheme could work for a-Si-TFT-LCD, which was proved by the high display uniformity across the entire display area. The mother glass 300mm x 320mm was the very forerunner of the mother glass generation competition which started around 1990, 2 years after Sharp 14-in. full color TFT-LCD was demonstrated.

What obstacles (technical, political, geographic) needed to be overcome?

Technology wise: At the time when a mere small 3-in. a-Si-TFT-LCD production was just started with poor yield, unstable and far-from-being-matured production equipment, small output capacity drivers, engineers had to prepare line-defect free TFT-LCD panels with high display quality, meaning large contrast ratio, high color saturation with high uniformity, and they made a precise electrical and physical system analysis and designing and devised redundant pixel and bus line schemes, and employed normally-white LCD operation mode, which was first employed in 3-in. TFT-LCD panel, and developed the TFT-LCD panel and its driving scheme to achieve higher contrast ratio, better gray scale and full-color rendition, wider tolerance in temperature and cell-gap variations, leading higher display uniformity across the entire large display area, than normally-black mode could achieve.

Organization management wise: Sharp's first application of TFT-LCD was television which is supposed to be exposed to "critical" consumers 3-5 hours everyday for more than 10 years. So, from the very begging of development project, TV business group, who understand the market, located in Yaita-shi, Tochigi-ken, and TFT-LCD research group located in Tenri-shi, Nara-ken, worked closely; even though, two places are about 600km apart. TV group, headed by Magohiro ARAMOTO, joined by Shuhji KOHZAI later on, showed the clear target specifications and evaluation methods to TFT-LCD research group; TFT-LCD research group, headed by Masataka MATUURA, achieved and acquired them. In the production project, LCD business group, headed by Mitsuo ISHII, located in Yamato-Kohriyama-shi, Nara-ken, joined the project, bringing in panel production technology including large mother glass handing know-hows and the world-first TFT-LCD factory was build in the precinct of Research and Development group, near the TFT-LCD research group. The 14-in. TFT-LCD panels were prepared by using the production line. There were lot of fierce arguments and misunderstandings among three groups, but those were suppressed and solved by tightly sharing the common mission: Make TV displays for OUR TVs!

What features set this work apart from similar achievements?

At the very beginning of a-Si-TFT-LCD business startup, this work clearly showed a-Si-TFT-LCD have the potential to replace monster CRT in the coming information age by its superior characteristics: flatness, light-weight, small power consumption, high saturation full-color rendition, high readability in high ambient light, realized on the 14-in. display size, the most dominant size in the contemporary market by using the technology which was developed to mass-produce twenty 3-in. TFT-LCD TV panels laid out on the mother glass of 300mm x 320mm dimensions. The high display quality was brought about by the fierce battle and cooperation between TFT-LCD research group and TV business group. TV business group knew the market and joined the development project from the very beginning and gave a clear display quality target to TFT-LCD research group to achieve and make the TFT-LCD a viable display technology against CRT dominance. TFT-LCD research group accepted the challenge and made it.

References to establish the dates, location, and importance of the achievement: Minimum of five (5), but as many as needed to support the milestone, such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or citations to pages in scholarly books. At least one of the references must be from a scholarly book or journal article.

[113] “Sharp has developed a 14 TFT color LCD unit,” Sharp Corp. News Release, June 24, 1988. [114] T. Nagayasu, T. Oketani, T. Hirobe, H. Kato, S. Mizushima, H. Take, K. Yano, M. Hijikigawa, and I. Washizuka, “A 14-in-diagonal full color a-Si TFT LCD,” in Proc. Int. Display Research Conf., San Diego, CA, Oct. 1988, pp. 56–58.

[9] G. H. Heilmeier, “Liquid crystal displays: An experiment in interdisciplinary research that worked,” IEEE Trans. Electron Devices, vol. ED-23, July 1976.

[17] “George Heilmeier. The liquid crystal display,” Wall Street J., May 24, 1993.

[1] H. Kawamoto, “The History of Liquid-Crystal Display and its Industry,” Proceedings of 2012 IEEE HISTELCON, Pavia, Italy, September 2012

Supporting materials (supported formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, DOC): All supporting materials must be in English, or if not in English, accompanied by an English translation. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. For documents that are copyright-encumbered, or which you do not have rights to post, email the documents themselves to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please see the Milestone Program Guidelines for more information.

<a href="20130215_IEEE_attachments.pdf" class="internal" _fck_mw_filename="20130215_IEEE_attachments.pdf" _fck_mw_type="media" title="20130215 IEEE attachments.pdf">20130215 IEEE attachments.pdf</a>

20130218 IEEE GHN milestone Sharp 14in. TFT-LCD 1988 General Description-10.pdf