Modification options for TFT screens

Colour TFT (Thin Film Transistor) displays are everywhere. From our beloved phones and wearables to billboards, dashboards, medical equipment and even coffee machines. TFTs are essential to the clear and high-resolution view you expect of any digital display. But as these examples show, the places and spaces in which you might find one vary greatly, and each respective application will have a slightly different operational requirement from its TFT.

Like all design, when it comes to building a display into your product, it’s generally a matter of balancing the right price with the desired outcome. In the vast majority of cases, you’ll be looking to get the maximum product performance from a fixed budget and that might mean that instead of an expensive custom solution, a slight modification to an existing product is a more than acceptable alternative. For example, a standard display, such as a touch monitor, will have a housing that generally comprises of its front bezel, a TFT cell with electronics and a backlight system. All these elements can be scaled up or down, depending on the size of the display. But what if you need to operate it across different temperature ranges? Or in spaces of differing levels of brightness? Or both?

The beauty of building your displays with Avnet Embedded lies in our extensive modification expertise. We are able to adjust the liquid, polarisers and electronics of TFT cells to extend the temperature tolerance of your display. So, for example, if your existing display gives you just a standard range of zero to 50° Celsius, we can make the appropriate modification that will allow it to be used in extreme temperatures – from -40° up to 80°.

Equally, if it will be used in different settings – bright sunlight, for example – but is currently a standard display for a normal indoor environment, we can lower or increase the brightness of the whole display by modifying the backlight system to which the TFT cell is attached. Both modifications are an excellent way to take an existing standard display and tailor it to a variable marketplace cost effectively.

Our in-house experts at Avent Embedded understand the many cost and performance challenges in bringing a product to market and have decades of extensive experience in designing touch-driven solutions! Discover more about customisation and modification by contacting our team.