Liquid Crystal Display A liquid crystal display (LCD) is a flat panel display, electronic visual display, or video display

that uses the light modulating properties of liquid crystals (LCs). LCs do not emit light directly. LCDs are used in a wide range of applications, including computer monitors, television, instrument panels, aircraft cockpit displays, signage, etc. They are common in consumer devices such as video players, gaming devices, clocks, watches, calculators, and telephones. LCDs have replaced cathode ray tube (CRT) displays in most applications. They are available in a wider range of screen sizes than CRT and plasma displays, and since they do not use phosphors, they cannot suffer image burnin. LCDs are, however, susceptible to image persistence Advantages 1. Very compact and light. 2. Low power consumption. 3. No geometric distortion. 4. Little or no flicker depending on backlight technology. 5. Not affected by screen burn-in. 6. Can be made in almost any size or shape. 7. No theoretical resolution limit. Disadvantages 1. Limited viewing angle, causing color, saturation, contrast and brightness to vary, even within the intended viewing angle, by variations in posture. 2. Bleeding and uneven backlighting in some monitors, causing brightness distortion, especially toward the edges. 3. Smearing and ghosting artifacts caused by slow response times (>8 ms) and "sample and hold" operation. 4. Only one native resolution. Displaying resolutions either requires a video scaler, lowering perceptual quality, or display at 1:1 pixel mapping, in which images will be physically too large or won't fill the whole screen. 5. Fixed bit depth, many cheaper LCDs are only able to display 262,000 colors. 8-bit S-IPS panels can display 16 million colors and have significantly better black level, but are expensive and have slower response time.

6. Low bit depth results in images with unnatural or excessive contrast. 7. Input lag 8. Dead or stuck pixels may occur during manufacturing or through use. 9. In a constant-on situation, thermalization may occur, which is when only part of the screen has overheated and looks discolored compared to the rest of the screen. 10. Not all LCDs are designed to allow easy replacement of the backlight. 11. Cannot be used with light guns/pens

There are four basic types of interfaces you select when integrating an Liquid Crystal Display into your product, They are: 1.External LCD Controller and Drivers. (LCD Glass) This level is the basic level where you are responsible to provide the complex AC waveform that will control the status of the opacity of each segment/dot on the Liquid Crystal Display. This can be done by specialized driver chips typically used for stand-alone Liquid Crystal Display Glass (non-module) applications, which come as an individual ICs, or integrated into a microprocessor IC. 2.LCD Drivers w/ CPU Embedded Controller. (LCD Module) The module needs complex AC voltage waveforms for the LCDs and require an controller external to the module to keep refreshing the individual pixel information to their drive circuitry. The configuration uses a controller integrated into your microprocessor. 3.Integrated LCD Controller & Drivers. (LCD Module) These ICs interface to the customers data bus and allow the user to specify the status of the pixels in the LCD Module display. These ICs will take care of all of the house keeping and refresh activities. These ICs are integrated into the LCD Modules made by Pacific Display Devices. 4.LCD Drivers w/ External Controller. (LCD Module) The module needs complex AC voltage waveforms for the LCDs and require a controller.

Discription: A 16x2 LCD means it can display 16 characters per line and there are 2 such lines. In this LCD each character is displayed in 5x7 pixel matrix. This LCD has two registers. 1. Command/Instruction Register- stores the command instructions given to the

LCD. A command is an instruction given to LCD to do a predefined task like initializing, clearing the screen, setting the cursor position, controlling display etc. 2. Data Register- stores the data to be displayed on the LCD. The data is the

ASCII value of the character to be displayed on the LCD.

Commonly used LCD Command code

Pin configuration: Pin Symbol Description

1 2

VSS VCC

Ground Main supply

0V power +5 V

VEE

Power supply Contrast adjustment by providing a variable to contrast control resistor through VCC

RS

Register Select

RS=0 to select Command Register RS=1 to select Data Register

R/W

Read/write

R/W=0 to write to the register R/W=1 to read from the register

EN

Enable

A high to low pulse (minimum 450ns wide) is given when data is sent to data pins

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

DB0 DB1 DB2 DB3 DB4 DB5 DB6 DB7

To letters

display or

numbers, their ASCII codes 8-bit data pins

are sent to data pins RS=1). instruction command codes are sent to these pins. (with Also

15 16

Led+ Led-

Backlight VCC Backlight Ground

+5 V 0V

Programming the LCD: 1. Data pin8 (DB7) of the LCD is busy flag and is read when R/W = 1 & RS = 0.

When busy flag=1, it means that LCD is not ready to accept data since it is busy with the internal operations. Therefore before passing any data to LCD, its command register should be read and busy flag should be checked. 2. To send data on the LCD, data is first written to the data pins with R/W = 0 (to

specify the write operation) and RS = 1 (to select the data register). A high to low pulse is given at EN pin when data is sent. Each write operation is performed on the positive edge of the Enable signal. 3. To send a command on the LCD, a particular command is first specified to the

data pins with R/W = 0 (to specify the write operation) and RS = 0 (to select the command register). A high to low pulse is given at EN pin when data is sent. Displaying single character A on LCD The LCD is interfaced with microcontroller (AT89C51). This microcontroller has 40 pins with four 8-bit ports (P0, P1, P2, and P3). Here P1 is used as output port which is connected to data pins of the LCD. The control pins (pin 4-6) are controlled by pins 24 of P0 port. Pin 3 is connected to a preset of 10k? to adjust the contrast on LCD screen. This program uses the above concepts of interfacing the LCD with controller by displaying the character A on it.