An Opportunistic Source Line Driving Scheme for Low Power Mobile TFT-LCD Driver IC

An opportunistic source line driving (OSLD) scheme is proposed for use in mobile TFT_LCD driver ICs (T-LDIs). In OSLD scheme, the operation of the source drivers of a T-LDI is controlled by the equivalence of RGB color data for adjacent pixels. That is, one source driver drives the neighboring source lines as well as the corresponding one when the color data of adjacent pixcels are identical to each other. With this scheme, all the source drivers associated with the neighboring source lines can be completely turned off, allowing the reduction of static and dynamic current of these drivers. Test chip was fabricated in a 5-V/0.8-um 2.5V/0.25-um triple-metal CMOS process, and the experimental result shows that the power reduction of 12% ~ 21% was obtained with die size overhead less than 0.5%.