lcdtft
Every explanation I've seen about how TFT/LCD screens work only talks about one pixel at a time. My question is: how are thousands of pixels and subpixels connected and controlled?
I assume that they don't have a +ve/-ve pair of wires each or else the wires would block out the light. If the signal is routed through other pixels, how do we control where the signal goes?
The problem with using a microcontroller to drive an LCD is that an LCD requires constant attention. This can be mitigated with a CPLD driven over SPI (using DMA, of course), but then you run into the other problem: Color LCDs require a lot of data. 320x240 in black and white is marginal at 9.6KB, but make it 24 bit color and suddenly you need to deliver 230KB of data in 1/60th of a second. (Don't forget, though, that you can get 4-bit, 16-color control just by tieing the low 20 bits to one setting). A 24-bit frame buffer no longer fits in onboard RAM on most microcontrollers, and you probably don't have time to read from an external RAM chip, clock the data out, and still do other processing. Trying to do this with a CPLD (or an FPGA) and a RAM chip gets you well over the $2 price that caused you to balk in your question.
The traditional solution to interfacing a microcontroller with a color LCD is a display controller like an SSD1963. Here's a very simple block diagram:
Parallel input to a big RAM frame buffer (Translation: More than $2) interfaced with a register-configurable parallel LCD interface. The parallel input is usually compatible with a memory bus interface.
The color LCD market is not always easy to find on the web, usually being the domain of OEMs only, with the rest buying displays from companies who integrate the controller with the display. The best resource I've found has been Crystal Fontz, specifically this page on choosing graphic LCDs. Scroll to the bottom for the controllers, which include the following options (note: Not all are color controllers):
Economy of scale.
Buy 100,000 chips that will do for all displays at say $0.10 each, or buy 50,000 of one chip at, say, $0.15 and 50,000 of another chip at $0.15 each.
(figures purely fictional - for illustration only)
You do the maths.
While it's not 100% perfect for every display, it does mean that they are cheaper, which is good for all of us.
Best Answer
The question appears to be essentially about how light can pass through the conductors connecting to each pixel in an LCD display - and secondly, how the connectivity to individual pixels can be achieved without interfering with the densely packed pixels themselves.
For the first query, the answer is transparent conductors. The most well-known such material is Indium Tin Oxide (ITO), a transparent, colorless (in thin layers) conductive material. Thin traces of ITO, or other such transparent conductors, are sandwiched between layers of glass, to form the matrix of conductors in an LCD panel.
A useful, simple article here describes this better than perhaps I can.
The ITO conductors and the individual "pixels" can be seen by looking through an LCD panel into polarized light. For instance, the reflection of the daytime sky on a glass window or automobile windshield serves nicely: The reflected light is polarized, so by rotating the LCD around, at certain angles the pixels (and to an extent the ITO traces) will block this light through cross-polarization.
For the second question, the simplest parallel is to consider double-sided PCBs. The copper traces on such PCBs are etched on both sides of the substrate, thus a crisscross matrix of connections can be achieved without any two traces intersecting with each other. The same rationale applies to transparent ITO conductors in an LCD - to over-simplify, consider all horizontal traces to be on the upper layer of glass, and all vertical traces to be on the lower layer.
In many modern LCD technologies, the traces can actually pass not just between the pixels, but also beneath them: The conductor layer is distinct from the liquid crystal layer. The liquid crystal cells themselves are activated not by electricity passing directly through them, but by the effect of an electric field they are exposed to. Thus the ITO conductors simply need to be above and below each pixel, and the liquid crystals align according to the direction of the field.
This crystal alignment gives rise to the polarization of the light passing through. As a fundamental principle of optics, if light polarized in one direction is passed through a polarizer aligned at right angles to it, the light gets absorbed - thus giving rise to the opaque pixels. Change the electric field, and the polarization changes, the opacity abates.