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Dynamic Voltage Scaling for Low Power AMOLED

Displays with Improved Luminous Uniformity
Xinghua Xu, Jiaqing Zhao, Qiaofeng Li, Jiali Fan and Xiaojun Guo
Department of Electronic Engineering, School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
(x.guo@sjtu.edu.cn)

Abstract—This paper proposes a driving approach through
adjusting both the supplying voltage and the data voltage signal
according to the displayed images. It shown that the method can
not only effectively reduce the static power consumption, but also
help to improve the gray scale and compensation of the non-
luminous uniformity.
Keywords—AMOLED, low power, voltage scaling
shown in Fig. 2(a) and (b), respectively. The circuit implement
by FPGA and performance verification is show in Fig. 3(a).
By applying the method for different test images with a
display simulation platform [2], Fig. 3(b) and Fig. 3(c) shows
that the method can not only improve the display uniformity,
but also effectively reduce the static power consumption.

I. INTRODUCTION
With the significant improvement of luminance efficiency
of OLEDs and reduction of pixel area for low power high
resolution mobile displays, the required largest pixel current
has become less than 10-7 A. With such a low current, most of
lower gray levels would make the driving TFT be operated in
the subthreshold regime, especially when high mobility TFT is
needed to achieve fast refresh rate. It becomes challenging to Fig. 2 The AMOLED pixel circuits used in the study: (a) the simplest 2T-1C
design and (b) the 6T-1C design with in-pixel compensation.
finely define the gray levels, since small data voltage
fluctuations might cause significant current change. Moreover,
the conventional compensation approach will not work
properly when the driving TFT is operated in the subthreshold
regime. In this work, based on the drain bias dependent
nearthreshold characteristics in low temperature polycrystalline
silicon (LTPS) TFTs (Fig. 1), a dynamic voltage scaling
approach is proposed for adjusting the drain-to-source voltage
(supply voltage) and the gate-to-source voltage (data voltage)
according to displayed images. The method is shown to be
able to improve the luminous uniformity, and also further
reduce the static power consumption of the AMOLED displays
of low pixel current.

Fig. 1 The transfer curves of a LTPS TFT shows drain voltage bias dependent
near-threshold characteristics.
II. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The simplest 2T-1C pixel circuit and the 6T-1C in-pixel
compensation circuit [1] are used to verify the approach, as
Fig 3. (a) The flow for verification of the proposed method in display panels
with FPGA and MATLAB. (b) Quantitiave image quality evaluation of the
different display images using the proposed dynamic voltage scaling (DVS)
method for 2T1C and 6T1C pixel circuits using the structural similarity index
(SSIM). (c) Comparison the power reductin with the DVS approach.
REFERENCES
[1] Samsung Patent CN100386794C.
[2] Q. Cui, et al., “ Dynamic supply voltage scaling of pixel circuits for
static power reduction in AMOLEDs, ” SID Symp., 44 (1), pp. 1040-
1043, 2013.

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