Feasibility Study of Integrating Source Driver on Array Using Low-Temperature Polycrystalline Silicon Thin-Film Transistors

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed a new kind of source driver with fully digital driving and a new approach to implement source driver on array (SoA). For the SoA circuit, the digital/analogue converters and buffers are replaced with pulse width modulation circuit and data voltage setting circuit to simplify the source driver. Thus, the signal converting part in the conventional source driver can be omitted and is much more easy to be built with thin-film transistors on the glass. Further, the feasibility of integrating SoA will be studied in the practical way. The layout area and power consumption are found to be the obstacles if we want to use the current thin-film transistor technology to implement SoA. However, the fully digital driving concept can be still applied to develop the configuration of digital interface. We can use the external source driver to produce the digital pulse width signal to set the pixel voltage. This method avoids issue of layout area and power consumption. Hence, the concept of digital interface is much more practical and feasible to reduce the cost and power of data driving instead of SoA.