High Performance and Low Power Timing Controller

Design for LCoS Microdisplay System

Sung-Wook Eo*, Joon Goo Lee*, Min-Seok Kim*, and Young-Chai Ko†
*
R&D Center RAONTECH Inc., Seongnam-si, Korea
†
School of Electrical Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea
Jeff.Eo@raon-tech.com

Abstract— A liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) microdisplay is

attractive for a wearable device to realize augmented reality (AR)
and virtual reality (VR), but it requires a design that consumes
lower power while improving picture quality. We propose a timing
controller architecture to reduce power consumption, as well as
image processing that can compensate for screen distortion and
improve brightness/contrast, and so on. In this paper we verify the
operation with FHD LCoS panels and confirm that it shows better
performance than other chips.

Keywords— timing controller; microdisplay; LCoS; ASIC;

I.
INTRODUCTION
As the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and
mixed reality (MR) market grows, the demand for microdisplay
is increasing, since it is smaller, lighter, and consumes less Fig. 1.
Overall architecture of the proposed TCON.
power than conventional panels. Among various types of
microdisplay panel, liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) is widely Many applications are binocular systems that drive two
used in the market because it is easier to design for high panels such like a head-mounted display (HMD). The proposed
resolution, cheaper and easier to mass-produce than digital TCON is designed to drive two panels simultaneously instead of
micromirror device (DMD) and organic light emitting diode one, thus power consumption can be reduced by almost half for
(OLED). the systems. In addition, for low power design, we separate clock
sources to adjust the clock frequency of receiver, frame buffer,
However, there are some technical issues to be realizable. A and transmitter side. Clock gating is also used to turn off unused
microdisplay must use a high magnification lens to enlarge a blocks depending on the configuration.
small screen, resulting in optical distortion problems [1]. In
addition, an LCoS panel using field sequential color (FSC) B.
Key Feature
operation requires a higher field rate with an inevitable large- TABLE I. shows the main feature of the proposed TCON.
size frame buffer, and it has lower brightness than other types of This TCON can support various input interfaces and panels of
panel [2]. Since most target applications are mobile, users may various resolutions. We implement various image processing
demand lower-power and compact design. functions to improve brightness and contrast. The distortion
In this paper, we propose the design of the timing controller correction functions can compensate distortion caused by optics
(TCON) as an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip and projection angle [3]. Note that 3D function can enhance the
by applying various techniques to resolve the problems immersion feeling in HMD applications.
mentioned above, and have completed the test with FHD LCoS
TABLE I.
KEY FEATURE OF THE PROPOSED TCON
panel.
Category Function
II.
DESIGN Input Interface LVDS (OpenLDI), LVCMOS RGB, MIPI DSI
A.
Architecture Output Interface LVDS (1.8V I/O, 8-bit serializer)
A pair of 1-clock & 8-data channels
The designed TCON consists of a video processor and a Image YUV to RGB converter
system controller, as shown in Fig. 1. The input video data Enhancement Black and white stretching
transmitted through the various interfaces is image-processed to Content adaptive brightness control
improve the image quality and stored in a frame buffer. The data Brightness/Contrast control
stored in the buffer is processed for panel compensation, Sharpness/Smoothing filter
Side-by-side 3D
changed to suitable format for corresponding panel interface, On screen display (OSD)
and transmitted to two panels at once. Panel Optical/Keystone distortion correction
Compensation Digital gamma correction
Field sequence control

978-1-5386-2285-8/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 71 ISOCC 2017

 TABLE II.
CHIP SPECIFICATION
Resource type Cost of the design
Technology TSMC 55nm Low power
Supply: Core/IO/MIPI/LVDS Rx 1.2 V / 1.8 V / 1.2V / 2.5 V
Die size 6.48 mm x 6.75 mm
Gate count (incl. SRAM) 26 MGE (Mega gate equivalents)
Maximum Internal Frequency 188 MHz
(a) (b) (c)
TABLE III.
A BRIEF COMPARISON OF FEATURES WITH SIMILAR CHIPS
Fig. 2.
Photos of a fabricated chip: (a) die, (b) package top and (c) bottom.
Ours [5] [6] [7]
Max. supporting WQHD WXGA HD FHD
panel resolution (1440p) (768p) (720p) (1080p)
Package type & FOWLP BGA WLCSP NFBGA
size [mm] 7.4x7.4 9x9 6.89x6.24 13x13
Power [mW] 261 157.8 330 269.6
(typ/max) /355 /442.5 /None /423.3
LVDS RGB
Measur Input N/A N/A
FHD 60Hz FHD 60 Hz
ement
Cond. FHD 360Hz N/A N/A N/A
Output
x 2 panels 1 panel 1 panel 0.5 panel
compare power consumption. However, to drive two panels,
they will have to use two or four chips, so power consumption
will also increase by two or four times. In addition, the input and
output resolution of our chip is higher or equal. Therefore, we
can confirm that the power consumption of our TCON is the
lowest for binocular system while supporting such high
resolution and field rate, and powerful functions. The package
Fig. 3. ASIC verification environment and output image from the panel. size is small enough for a diminutive device.

III.
CHIP VERIFICATION RESULT IV.
CONCLUSION

A.
Specification of the chip
TCON is fabricated with TSMC 55 nm CMOS technology
and packaged with fan-out wafer level package (FOWLP). Fig.
2 shows the layout and package of the chip. The key
specification of the ASIC is summarized in TABLE II.
B.
ASIC verification result
Fig. 3 shows the test environment of our microdisplay
system. We use an HDMI bridge chip to convert HDMI signal
to LVDS signal [4]. One TCON drives two LCoS panels using
LVDS transmitter. The backplane of each panel expresses pixel
data transmitted from the TCON, and then enlarged through the
optical system with a backlight unit. Finally, video is displayed
to the user. The upper right part of Fig. 3 is an image taken from
the optical system output.
Our test configuration, power consumption, and a brief
comparison of features with similar chips are shown in TABLE
III. The measurement of power dissipation depends on many
factors such as which image pattern is fed, which input interface
is used, how many and which function blocks are turned on, and
so on. In our test, we used SMPTE color bar for input with
LVDS Rx interface. All image processing modules are turned
off for typical case, and digital gamma (10~13mW), optical
distortion correction (80~187mW), and 3D (5~6mW) functions
are turned on for max power case. All other image processing
modules except OSD consumes less than 10mW total. Single-
panel operation consumes 88 ~ 93% power of dual panel case.
Other chips in the table would have measured power
consumption under different conditions, so it is not easy to
A high performance and low power TCON has been
successfully fabricated for LCoS microdisplay systems. Our
proposed TCON can drive up to two panels having high
resolution, thus it consumes the least power in binocular systems.
In addition, various image processing modules are embedded to
overcome disadvantages of the LCoS microdisplay system.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by the Technology Innovation
Program (No.10076638, One-chip Microdisplay with WVGA,
WSVGA resolution module Development for Wearable Devices)
funded By the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy(MOTIE,
Korea)
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978-1-5386-2285-8/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 72 ISOCC 2017