With the increasingly wide applications of the technology of flat panel display, providing IC solutions becomes very essential. Display devices, such as LCD, LED, OLED, or PDP, perform their excellence at different occasions, due to their distinct characteristics. The distinction results in the demands of specific driver ICs to deliver voltage and current to adapt the individually specific characteristics. LCD requires tens of volts. PDP requires hundreds of volts. LED requires a few tens of milli-amperes. All the voltage and current ranges are beyond the conventional digital circuit.

To deliver voltage or current accurately and uniformly to every pixel, the display unit, is critical for image and video quality.

Success of high-brightness blue and white LEDs leads to a prospective future for LED displays and thus the LED displays are expected to be widely used indoors and outdoors. Blue and white LEDs enrich the color representation for commercial video. Large-sized outdoor commercial ads are among various applications. High brightness exceeds the application limits to outdoors. That is why stadiums can provide vivid close-ups to its audience.

With increasing needs for LED drivers, we are prompted to put LED drivers in one of the listed targets.

As for LCD, OLED and PDP, we will make the successive research efforts to provide adequate solutions.

In contrary to LED, operating in current mode and requiring a constant current to emit the light, LCD, as operating in voltage mode, needs a high driving voltage to twist the optical axis of liquid crystal. To make LCD driver ICs, a specific high-voltage fabrication process and design methodology must be used. However, the required specific high voltages cannot be obtained automatically. A power conversion IC with multi-channel outputs is needed to deliver the required high voltages. The voltage levels are taken as references to determine the electric field intensity of TFT-LCD, upon which the transmission or reflectivity is determined.

Since LCD-TV and LCD monitors are booming, we have highly intensive interest in backlighting for LCD. The backlighting for LCD relies mainly on two types of light materials, CCFL and LED. The backlighting with CCFL requires specific high voltages to emit lights and as a result, needs a power conversion IC to deliver the required high voltages. As opposed to the high voltage requirement of the CCFL backlighting, the backlighting with LED needs a power conversion IC to deliver constant current. For backlighting with CCFL or LED, another type of power conversion IC is also required.

The circuit architecture of power conversion ICs concerned includes two types, charge-pump and voltage-boost, either of which transforms input voltage to a specific high voltage then delivered to the driver ICs.

Power Conversion ICs are another target.