-S-

Term (Acronym) [units]: Definition

Saturation: The intensity of a specific hue or particular color. A highly saturated hue has a vivid, intense color, while a less saturated hue appears more muted.

Scaling: An operation performed by a digital signal processor to fill the screen with an image that doesn’t match the native resolution of an LCD panel (e.g., scaling an 800x600 image to fill a 1024x768 panel).

Scan Rate [MHz]: The speed at which a single horizontal line is drawn on the screen. Also called horizontal frequency.

Segment Display: A display such as that used on a calculator where each segment of a character or number is a single controllable element, rather than being formed by a number of pixels.

Semiconductor: A semiconductor is a material that behaves as an insulator at very low temperatures but has an appreciable conductivity at room temperature. The most commonly used semiconductor material is silicon.

Séquentiel Couleur Avec Mémoire (SECAM): A French and international broadcast standard for video and broadcasting. Higher resolution than NTSC.

Severed Available Market (SAM): A marketing term used to define the applicable market segment of a particular product; a subset of TAM.

Single Crystal Silicon (SCS): Silicon material that exhibits a continuous, regular crystalline lattice structure without internal grain boundaries; used in LTPS LCDs.

Small Molecule OLED (SMOLED): A form of OLED that uses small-molecule organic chemicals. SMOLEDs generally require the use of vacuum deposition in their construction; however, DuPont Displays recently announced the development of technology that allows SMOLEDs to be manufactured using a printing process rather than vacuum deposition techniques.

Small-Medium: Term used throughout the LCD industry for displays from 1" to 10" diagonal. There are at least 20 different applications for small-medium LCDs; the largest one by volume is cellphone LCDs.

Spatial Light Modulator (SLM): A MEMS device that imposes some form of spatially-varying modulation on a light beam. An SLM can modulate either the intensity or the phase of a light beam; it can also be used to modulate a laser beam for holographic storage. Texas Instruments’ DLP and Silicon Light Machine’s GLV are both spatial light modulators.

Sputtering: See PVD.

Stacked OLED (SOLED): An OLED that consists of multiple OLED displays layered on top of each other. The purpose of the layering is to increase the total light output.

Stuck Pixel: See Pixel Anomaly .

Subpixel: One of the three components of a pixel in a color LCD display. Subpixels can be red, blue or green. Each subpixel is capable of generating different intensities which creates a range of colors.

Subpixel Rendering: A method of increasing the apparent resolution of an LCD display by anti-aliasing black and white text. The method takes advantage of the fact that each pixel is actually made up of three subpixels.

Substrate: A base or surface on which something is built. Most substrates in displays are glass.

Subtractive Primaries: The so-called "process colors" of cyan, magenta and yellow. Each absorbs or subtracts its complementary color (red, green or blue) from the light reflected off paper.

Super High Aperture (SHA): A high-aperture ratio pixel design from Sharp with reduced TFT size and overlapping ITO over bus lines that allow higher transmissivity.

Super In-Plane Switching (S-IPS): The successor to IPS which improves the response time, reduces color shift and increases color accuracy. S-IPS does not have as high a contrast ratio as other wide-viewing-angle enhancement methods, but it has the best color accuracy.

Super PVA (S-PVA): Same as PVA with slightly improved pixel response time, viewing angles and color reproduction.

Supertwisted Nematic (STN): A type of liquid crystal material that provides more contrast than twisted nematic (TN) by twisting the liquid crystal molecules more than 180 degrees. STN displays are much slower than TFT displays (100ms vs. 4ms response time), but the color quality and viewing angle can approach those of TFT – at about half the cost.

Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW): A touch screen technology that uses ultrasonic sound to locate the user’s touch within the active area. Typically used only on monitors and larger displays.

Surface Mount Technology (SMT): A method of constructing electronic circuits where the components are mounted directly onto the surface of a printed circuit board. This has largely replaced the previous method of fitting components with wire leads into holes in a printed circuit board (known as through-hole technology).

Surface-Conduction Electron-Emitter Display (SED): A type of FED display created by Canon with assistance from Toshiba. Scheduled to go into production by the end of 2007, the display has been under development for more than 20 years.

SVGA (Super Video Graphics Display): A resolution of 800x600 pixels.

SXGA (Super Extended Graphics Array): A resolution of 1280x1024 pixels. This resolution is only available in monitors; it’s unique because of its 5:4 aspect ratio.

SXGA+: A resolution of 1400x1050 pixels; currently found mostly in 12"-15" laptop screens and 20" monitor screens.

System on Chip (SOC): Putting all the functions of a complete system (processor, memory, analog functions, external interfaces, timers, counters, voltage regulators, etc.) all on a single silicon chip, enabling the chip to operate as a standalone system.

System on Glass (SOG): Fabrication of IC devices that provide important functionality to a display directly onto the glass substrate. SOG is also sometimes called SOP (System-On-Panel).