Marine

Marine displays need to be able to withstand hostile environmental conditions. All of our maritime solutions are equipped to be sunlight readable and provide crystal clear images.

With over 20 years of combined experience in display technology, E3 has everything you need to develop and manufacture your custom touch display all in one place. With customer-centric solutions featuring strategic planning, competitive pricing, longevity and support, we ensure the best products on the market to help you scale. This case study will help provide valuable insights as to how we can help you from start to finish.

Our customer for this project manufactures end to end boat electronics and control systems. During the redesign of a bridge mounted navigational chart and sonar solution that required a mid-sized display and touch sensor, they struggled to find a solution that could meet the optical, environmental performance requirements, robust use case needs of such an application and do so at a competitive price point.

Three big challenges for such an application,

1. Design a display solution that would be readable without compromising color and contrast performance, both in direct sunlight and low light conditions.
2. Design a touch panel solution that would withstand exposure to UV light and function with water splash and glove usage. Any solution put forward had to withstand solar load, high temperatures and humidity.
3. Design a solution with long availability without change, consistent optical performance and competitive price points was also on the requirement list.

Our team worked with a major LCD maker and their engineering team to determine the best base LCD that would meet this application requirement. We designed a high brightness LED backlight system and changed the inside films that enabled a measurable brightness reading of 1500 nits but did so at low power and heat so we did not contribute to the heat gains inside our customers unit. Our custom backlight driver solution enables a very wide and smooth dimming of the backlight down to 1 nit of measurable brightness, perfect for nighttime usage.

Our custom touch panel was designed with high temperature, UV resistant materials and an Anti-Reflective front surface to further support outdoor viewability. With touch controller firmware fine tuned not to react to water droplets, support glove and finger use, the touch panel solution was properly designed for this application.

A full optical bond of the touch panel to the LCD was the logical assembly method to reduce reflective surfaces, increasing all light viewability, adding a layer of durability and eliminating the possibility of condensation build up between the LCD and touch panel.

We were able to meet the overall demand of this project with an understanding of the challenges, knowledge and great experience of the right materials and application techniques that would enable the use of display based solution in this harsh application.