
E-Lab Digital Engineering, Inc (http://www.elabinc.com/) has created an IC which can control directly a character lcd interfacing the PC serial port with the module!
The IC type is EDE702 and requires just a resistor and a 4Mhz crystal to operate!
The chip datasheet is here: http://www.elabinc.com/ede702.pdf
datasheet contains the schematic too.