In-Vehicle Display Technology

Abstract

Visualization technologies are the most vital components of in-vehicle interactions. The shift toward autonomous vehicles and connected cars is bringing a future in which occupants would be needed to monitor the status of the vehicle and its surroundings. Meanwhile, occupants would also spend significantly more time watching displays for entertainment, information, and connectivity on the road. Therefore, the need for in-vehicle displays with better visibility, brightness, viewing angle, resolution, sharpness, and reliability together with larger size and free-form that offer unobtrusive visual information during journeys is on the rise. Superior display with touch technologies can enable a safe, informative, and comfortable driving or riding experience. The applied in-vehicle display products include center infotainment display, rear-seat entertainment display, head-up display, side mirror display, and instrument cluster display. In this chapter, motivations, as well as various architectures of display including LED, LCD, OLED, mini-/micro-LED, TFT, flexible, head-up display, and touch screen, will be introduced. Designing displays into vehicles imposes very different challenges than designing them for consumer applications. This is due to some unique factors associated with vehicle usages, such as the required product life cycles, the extremely harsh environment, frequent mechanical impacts, the stringent EMI/EMC compliance, the required high-level ESD protection, and functional safety requirements. Requirements and challenges of display in-vehicle application, including fabrication, characterization, inspection, quality, reliability, EMI/EMC/ESD, and failure analysis are reviewed.