OLED display driver - Page 7

Atmel announced that Samsung is using their maXTouch E Series single-chip touch controller in the Focus Flash, Focus S, Galaxy Tab 7.7, the Galaxy S and the Galaxy Note. Atmel's maXTouch E touch controllers offer a single-chip solution that has an updated capacitive touch engine (CTE) that features new noise avoidance and noise suppression capabilities. According to Atmel, the new controllers has an improved performance in every aspect compared to their older generation controllers - higher fidelity touch sensing, faster responsiveness, lower power consumption and thinner form factors.

MagnaChip announced that they are providing 480X800 AMOLED display driver ICs for multiple Microsoft Windows-based smartphones. The company didn't say which companies they are supplying to, although it's probably Samsung. Samsung, Dell and Nokia are all producing Windows Phones (although Nokia's Lumia 800 has a different resolution - 854x480, which rules it out).

A couple of months ago MagnaChip announced that they are providing AMOLED drivers for the new Galaxy S2 LTE smartphone.

MagnaChip announced that they are providing the display driver IC for the new Galaxy S2 LTE smartphone announced a couple of weeks ago. MagnaChip's driver will be used in the S2 LTE phone with the 4.65" 800x480 Super AMOLED Plus display, not the S2 LTE HD phone (which has a Super AMOLED HD 1280x720 display).

MagnaChip says that their drive features MIPI DSI (Mobile Industry Processor Interface Display Serial Interface) designed specifically for smartphone applications and ACL (Automatic Current Limit) which significantly improves performance and power consumption efficiency.

Amulet Technologies announced the GEMexpress 2, a universal LCD/OLED display driver board that supports resolutions up to 800x600. This is an update to the original GEMexpress - with double the flash memory (to 64 megabit) and has four times the SDRAM memory (256 megabit).

The GEMexpress 2 is a six-layer pCB board (1.5"x3.0") that features Amulet's own GEM chip (which includes the LCD controller, touch panel decoder, ARM7 processor, and patented Graphical OS).

Samsung is introducing a new OLED driver IC that includes image optimization. OLED Max I provides color space conversion, sharpness emphasis, low gradation emphasis, favorite color conversion and block noise improvement technology. The IC size is 6(h)x6(w)x0.6(t) mm. It supports image resolution up to 800x1024, and includes RGB, 3/4-Wire SPI and I2C interfaces.

Samsung is already working on the next-gen driver (OLED Max II) which will include all of the Max I algorithms and also add Block Noise Reduction, Bit Truncation Noise Reduction and Automatic Current limit. The size, resolution and interfaces information haven't been released yet.

STMicroelectronics has unveiled their latest power management chip aimed for AMOLED (and Super-AMOLED) display - the STOD03A. The new chip has an improved performance (compared to the STOD02). ST says that only six external components
are needed to complete the power-supply circuitry, making the STOD03A the most attractive for handset builders.

The STOD03A
uses highly efficient synchronous operation for both voltage outputs,
achieving up to 85% overall efficiency for longer overall battery life.
Other power-saving features include automatic pulse-skipping operation
for low power consumption at light loads, and a true shutdown mode
drawing less than one microamp activated through the enable pin (EN). ST
has achieved its high performance using its Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI)
technology as part of its latest-generation BCD fabrication process,
which enables analog, digital and closely spaced high-power circuitry to
be built on the same chip.

Andrew Rinzler, professor of physics at the University of Florida has developed a new driving method for large OLED panels which basically brings the source and drain electrodes of a transistor closer together by stacking components on top of one another instead of side by side. The transistors are made from thin aluminum oxide film on a glass subtrate (as the drain electrode) and a layer of organic molecules as a channel. This enables good performance without the need for high-resolution lithography techniques. The new device also uses a tenth of the voltage of current OLEDs - which saves power.

Transistors on glass

They haven't yet made a large-sized panel, but it should be possible with the new design. It can also be used to make flexible OLEDs. They are currently working to simplify the architecture in hope to bring down the cost and complexity even further.

Texas Instruments introduced a new 200-mA dual output power supply that can improve the picture quality of AMOLED displays that require positive and negative supply rails. The TPS65137 uses a low dropout (LDO) post regulator for line and load transient response with minimum output voltage ripples to provide stable picture
quality. The input range is 2.3V to 5.5V and the size is 3mmx3mm.

The TPS65137 is available now and is priced at $0.85 in quantities of 1,000.

4D Systems (one of OLED-Info's sponsors) announced a new graphics chip, the Picaso-GFX2. The chip is designed to work with all popular OLED and LCD panels in the market. 4DS says the new chip sports powerful graphic, text, image, animation and sound generation capabilities. It can be used stand-alone as an embedded graphics processor or as a co-processor to host a micro-controller through its hardware serial interface. 4D says it's plug and play and will work with most 16-bit 80 series color LCD and OLED displays.

Amulet Technologies has released a new universal TFT/OLED display driver, the GEMexpress. The new driver is highly-integrated (six-layer PCBA) measuring 1.5"x3.0" and includes the display controller, a touch-panel decoder, and ARM7 processor and Amulet's Graphical-OS-In-Silicon which manages the user-interface for the display.  

Amulet say that this new display driver can save a lot of time because it can interface to 'virtually any display type'. More information over at their site.