Planar

Planar may refer to:

Science and technology

Other

See also

Planar Systems

Planar Systems, Inc. is a U.S. digital display manufacturing corporation based in Hillsboro, Oregon. Founded in 1983 as a spin-off from Tektronix, it was the first U.S. manufacturer of electroluminescent (EL) digital displays. Planar currently makes a variety of other specialty displays. The company, with $166.8 million in revenue (2013), is headed by chief executive officer and president Gerald K. Perkel. It is a subsidiary of Leyard Optoelectronic Co., a Chinese company.

History

1980s

Planar was founded in 1983 by Jim Hurd, Chris King, John Laney and others as a spin-off from the Solid State Research and Development Group of the Beaverton, Oregon, based Tektronix. In 1986, a division spun off from Planar to work on projection technology, InFocus.

1990s

In 1991, FinLux, a competitor in Espoo, Finland was purchased and is now the company's European headquarters. Planar's executives took the company public in 1993, listing the stock on the NASDAQ boards Planar acquired Tektronix's avionics display business, creating the short-lived Planar Advance in 1994. Standish Industries, a manufacturer of flat panel LCDs in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, was sold to Planar in 1997. This plant was closed in 2002 as worldwide LCD manufacturing shifted to East Asian countries.

Planar (computer graphics)

In computer graphics, planar is the method of representing pixel colours with several bitplanes of RAM. Each bit in a bitplane is related to one pixel on the screen. Unlike Chunky, Highcolour or Truecolour graphics, the whole data for an individual pixel isn't in one specific location in RAM, but spread across the bitplanes that make up the display.

This scheme originated in the early days of home computing, when cheaper memory chips could not supply data fast enough on their own to generate a picture on a TV screen or monitor. By splitting the data up into multiple planes, each plane could be stored on a separate memory chip. These chips could then be read in parallel at a slower rate, allowing graphical display on modest hardware. The CGA and EGA video adapters on early IBM PC computers used planar arrangement in colour graphical modes for this reason. When the later VGA was introduced, memory speeds had increased to the point where planar video modes were no longer a necessity, and aside from backwards-compatibility, using planar mode or not was left as a choice for the programmer.