Bernard Lechner

Bernard J. Lechner (2011)

Bernard J. Lechner (* 1932 in New York City , USA ; † April 11, 2014 ) was an American electrical engineer and inventor.

Life

Lechner grew up in New Rochelle , New York, as the son of Barnard J. Lechner as one of five children.

In Rochelle he attended middle school (English high school). Even at that time he was interested in radio and television and put together appropriate devices. There were also commercial devices that you could build yourself.

He then served in the US Army Signal Corps for two years , both in the USA and in Karlsruhe , Germany.

This was followed by studying electrical engineering at Columbia University in New York City , which he completed in 1957 with a bachelor's degree (BSEE).

After working at RCA, he completed additional studies at Princeton University and Harvard Business School .

Create

In 1957 he took up a position at the RCA Laboratories in Princeton , New Jersey , the then leading institution in the USA for the further development of radio and television.

In the second half of the 1960s, a team under the direction of George H. Heilmeier worked in these laboratories on the first development of liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Lechner, interested in a potential application of LCDs for television, therefore studied matrix arrangements of such displays with a limited number of picture elements ( pixels ) and found that such passive matrix displays had narrow limits with regard to the usable number of picture elements and their switching speed. His invention consisted of the control of each LCD pixel and an electrical storage capacity connected in parallel with it by a field effect transistor . This enabled the charge status and thus the contrast of a pixel to be checked and saved in a suitable manner. At a press conference at the RCA headquarters in New York in 1968, this concept was demonstrated as potentially suitable for television using a matrix consisting of 36 pixels, built up with discrete components. A corresponding publication followed in 1969. Although not so called at the time, Lechner invented the concept of active matrix displays (now known as AMLCDs or AM OLEDs for short on flat screens ).

After RCA had initially reduced its LCD activities and stopped completely in 1976, Lechner devoted himself to improvements and the further development of standards in US television technology. He was a member of the US delegation for the standardization of HDTV by the organization CCIR, Geneva, in 1989–1990.

In the USA he became known for the Lechner distance . The eye has a typical maximum ability to differentiate (resolution), which can be expressed as an angular measure, which Lechner related to the viewer's distance from the television screen and the height of the image. He was able to determine the optimal height of the television screen for the typical distance in US households of nine feet (approx. 3 m) between viewer and screen and the then vertical resolution of TV images according to the US NTSC standard of 525 lines. This could also explain that in Japanese households with an average smaller distance between viewer and screen, most of the devices sold were sensibly smaller than in the USA. Transferred to today's high definition television , the Lechner distance , given the distance between the viewer and the flat screen, can be used to determine the screen size at which the eye can barely perceive the image resolution.

Lechner was Staff Vice President of Advanced Video Systems at the RCA laboratories. He was also a member of the Honor Societies Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu and Sigma Xi .

When General Electric bought RCA and then ceded the David Sarnoff Research Center to SRI International in 1987, Lechner opted for early retirement. He then worked as a consultant in Newtown, Pennsylvania .

Honors

• Fellow of the Society for Information Display (SID), of which he was a founding member and later President from 1978 to 1980
• SID Frances Rice Darne Award, 1971
• SID Beatrice Winner Award, 1983
• Fellow of the IEEE
• IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal , 2011
• David Sarnoff Medal, 1996
• Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE)
• SMPTE Progress Medal, 2001
• Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) Outstanding Achievement Award. ATSC has called this award the Bernard J. Lechner Award since 2000 , which is presented annually.

Fonts (selection)

• Lechner, BJ: Testing HDTV terrestrial broadcasting systems, IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, Vol. 37 (1991), 4, pp. 148-151
• Kressel H. and Lechner, BJ (guest editors): Scanning the issue-Special issue on consumer electronics , Proc. of the IEEE, Vol. 82: 4 (1994), pp. 445-458
• Lechner, BJ; Chernock, R .; Eyer, MK; Goldberg, A .; Goldman, MS: The ATSC Transport Layer, Including Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP), Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 94 (2006), 1, pp. 77-101

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary in the NJ Times, April 22, 2014
2. ↑ Oral interview with Lechner on July 28, 2012, towards the end of the recording
3. ↑ Description by the SID organization on the occasion of the IEEE award
4. ^ Benjamin Gross, "How RCA lost the LCD," IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 49, November 11, 2012, pp. 49-53
5. ^ BJ Lechner, FJ Marlowe, EO Nester and J. Tults: "Liquid crystal matrix displays", Dig. Tech. Papers, 1969 IEEE Int. Solid-State Circuits Conf., Pp. 52-53
6. ↑ Commercial importance of TFT active matrix displays in 2011 ( Memento of the original from October 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ↑ Definition of the term Lechner Distance
8. ^ Lechner Distance
9. ↑ TV Viewing Distance Guide
10. ↑ IEEE press release on the occasion of the award ceremony, Aug. 2011 ( Memento of the original from September 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
11. ↑ Lechner Award ( Memento of the original from November 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.