An ARINC D-Size, liquid crystal display for aircraft primary flight instruments

An ARINC D-Size, liquid crystal display (LCD) based display unit (DU) for EFIS type applications on commercial transports has been developed. This display unit provides high resolution, full color, grayscale, graphic images for presenting piloting information queues. The DU features: high contrast with an achromatic background over wide viewing angles (both horizontal and vertical), a large color gamut, temperature compensation for graylevel stability, response time compensation for fast moving images, a large graylevel palette to support dimmable, color weather radar images and shading colors for areas such as sky blue, ground amber and tape background grays, heaters for cold temperature start-up and, 100 fL brightness with a 2000:1 dimming range. A custom graphics generator chip set is used to provide anti-aliasing, symbol prioritization, masking, image fusion, and variable line width drawing capability. A high-speed digital data link with data compression provides the interface to the graphics generator located remotely in the aircraft equipment bay. The display system architecture, optical performance and key LCD technology features are reviewed here.<>