Highly power-efficient and reliable light-emitting diode backlight driver IC for the uniform current driving of medium-sized liquid crystal displays

Abstract

In this paper, a light-emitting diode (LED) backlight driver integrated circuit (IC) for medium-sized liquid crystal displays (LCDs) is proposed. In the proposed IC, a linear current regulator with matched internal resistors and an adaptive phase-shifted pulse-width modulation (PWM) dimming controller are also proposed to improve LED current uniformity and reliability. The double feedback loop control boost converter is used to achieve high power efficiency, fast transient characteristic, and high dimming frequency and resolution. The proposed IC was fabricated using the 0.35 ${\mu}m$ bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process. The LED current uniformity and LED fault immunity of the proposed IC were verified through experiments. The measured power efficiency was 90%; the measured LED current uniformity, 97%; and the measured rising and falling times of the LED current, 86 and 7 ns, respectively. Due to the fast rising and falling characteristics, the proposed IC operates up to 39 kHz PWM dimming frequency, with an 8-bit dimming resolution. It was verified that the phase difference between the PWM dimming signals is changed adaptively when LED fault occurs. The experiment results showed that the proposed IC meets the requirements for the LED backlight driver IC for medium-sized LCDs.