This is an excerpt from A. Dyess, W. King, and T. Greer, " HILFD-1400," ECE 4542: Design II, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University, Fall 2003:

Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) are a very popular way to display information from compact and embedded systems. Systems that use LCDs are found in classrooms as valuable teaching aids and in company research labs as debugging tools to test developing products. In both of these situations, the information displayed needs to be easily viewable to all parties involved in testing, which is not easily achieved with a small LCD screen. There are many large format displays (LFDs) already in production. However, they cannot be used as direct replacements for LCDs because there are no large format displays in production that communicate via the Hitachi HD44780 specification, which is the standard for LCD communication. Therefore, a Hitachi interfaced large format display (HILFD) is needed to provide people performing system tests with an easily readable device to mimic system LCDs.