Do you love the retro stuffs? If you did, then you must be very excited with the old display technology, such as the nixie tubes. Although the nixie tubes are cool, but it’s difficult to work with because they require higher voltages than the digital logic did!

In other hand, the Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) is much better than the nixie tubes. One of the main benefits of using the VFD is it actually produces light directly, since it doesn’t require a backlight. VFD is a very familiar display that being used on various players and appliances, example likes VCR, CD, DVD, microwaves, car radios and so on.

Unlike the liquid crystal display (LCD), VFD emits a very bright light with clear contrast and it can be easily supported display elements of various colors.

Basically, the device consists of a hot cathode (filaments), anodes (phosphor) and grids that encased in a glass envelope under a high vacuum condition. The cathode is made up of tungsten wires and it’s fully coated by alkaline earth metal oxides, where it emits electrons when heated by an electric current. These electrons are controlled and diffused by the grids, and it’s made up of thin metal.

Blogsphere: TechnoratiFeedsterBloglines
Bookmark: Del.icio.usSpurlFurlSimpyBlinkDigg
RSS feed for comments on this post  |  TrackBack URI for this post

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Embedded General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.