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A vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) is a display device used commonly on consumer-electronics equipment such as video cassette recorders, car radios, and microwave ovens. A VFD operates on the principle of cathodoluminescence, roughly similar to a cathode ray tube, but operating at much lower voltages. Each tube in a VFD has an anode coated phosphor that is bombarded by electrons emitted from the cathode filament. In fact, each tube in VFD is a triode vacuum tube because it also has a mesh control grid. Unlike liquid crystal displays, a VFD emits a very bright light with high contrast and can support display elements of various colours. Standard illumination figures for VFDs are around 640 cd/m2 with high-brightness VFDs operating at 4,000 cd/m2, and experimental units as high as 35,000 cd/m2 depending on the drive voltage and its timing.〔 The choice of color (which determines the nature of the phosphor) and display brightness significantly affect the lifetime of the tubes, which can range from as low as 1,500 hours for a vivid red VFD to 30,000 hours for the more common green ones.〔 Cadmium was commonly used in VFDs in the past, but the current RoHS-compliant VFDs have eliminated this metal from their construction. VFDs can display seven-segment numerals, multi-segment alpha-numeric characters or can be made in a dot-matrix to display different alphanumeric characters and symbols. In practice, there is little limit to the shape of the image that can be displayed: it depends solely on the shape of phosphor on the anode(s). The first VFD was the single indication DM160 by Philips in 1959.〔http://www.radiomuseum.org/tubes/tube_dm160.html〕 The first multi-segment VFD was the 1962 Japanese single-digit, seven-segment device. The displays became common on calculators and other consumer electronics devices.〔Joseph A. Castellano (ed), ''Handbook of display technology'' Gulf Professional Publishing, 1992 ISBN 0-12-163420-5 page 9〕 In the late 1980s hundreds of millions of units were made yearly.〔Joseph A. Castellano (ed), ''Handbook of display technology'' Gulf Professional Publishing, 1992 ISBN 0-12-163420-5 page 176〕 == Design == The device consists of a hot cathode (filaments), anodes (phosphor) and grids encased in a glass envelope under a high vacuum condition. The cathode is made up of fine tungsten wires, coated by alkaline earth metal oxides, which emit electrons when heated by an electric current. These electrons are controlled and diffused by the grids, which are made up of thin metal. If electrons impinge on the phosphor-coated plates, they fluoresce, emitting light. Unlike the orange-glowing cathodes of traditional vacuum tubes, VFD cathodes are efficient emitters at much lower temperatures, and are therefore essentially invisible.〔Joseph A. Castellano (ed), ''Handbook of display technology'', Gulf Professional Publishing, 1992 ISBN 0-12-163420-5 Chapter 7 Vacuum Fluorescent Displays pp. 163 and following〕 The principle of operation is identical to that of a vacuum tube triode. Electrons can only reach (and "illuminate") a given plate element if both the grid and the plate are at a positive potential with respect to the cathode. This allows the displays to be organized as multiplexed displays where the multiple grids and plates form a matrix, minimizing the number of signal pins required. In the example of the VCR display shown to the right, the grids are arranged so that only one digit is illuminated at a time. All of the similar plates in all of the digits (for example, all of the lower-left plates in all of the digits) are connected in parallel. One by one, the microprocessor driving the display enables a digit by placing a positive voltage on that digit's grid and then placing a positive voltage on the appropriate plates. Electrons flow through that digit's grid and strike those plates that are at a positive potential. The microprocessor cycles through illuminating the digits in this way at a rate high enough to create the illusion of all digits glowing at once via persistence of vision. Several amateurs have experimented with the possibilities of using VFDs as triodes. The extra indicators (in our example, "VCR", "Hi-Fi", "STEREO", "SAP", etc.) are arranged as if they were segments of an additional digit or two or extra segments of existing digits and are scanned using the same multiplexed strategy as the real digits. Some of these extra indicators may use a phosphor that emits a different colour of light, for example, orange. The light emitted by most VFDs contains many colours and can often be filtered to enhance the colour saturation providing a deep green or deep blue, depending on the whims of the product's designers. Phosphors used in VFDs are different from those in cathode-ray displays since they must emit acceptable brightness with only around 50 volts of electron energy, compared to several thousand volts in a CRT.〔 William M. Yen, Shigeo Shionoya, Hajime Yamamoto (editors) ,''Phosphor Handbook'', CRC Press, 2007 ISBN 0-8493-3564-7 Chapter 8 〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Vacuum fluorescent display」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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