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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS
Low Flicker Dimmable Multichannel LED Driver
With Matrix-Style DPWM and Precise
Current Matching
Poki Chen , Member, IEEE, Yung-Hsuan Chen, John Carl Joel S. Marquez , Graduate Student Member, IEEE,
Ruei-Ting Wang, Jiann-Jong Chen , Senior Member, IEEE, and Yuh-Shyan Hwang , Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract— A low flicker dimmable four-channel LED driver
with precise current balancing is proposed in this paper. It is
able to achieve highly linear dimming and low lighting flicker at
the same time by utilizing a new matrix-style digital pulsewidth
modulation (DPWM) along with LED string rotation. Only one
LED string needs to be modulated to reduce the total LED cur-
rent variation and switching loss. To avoid color shift and reduce
the effect of subharmonic flicker, a fourth-order common centroid
layout is applied to match the current-controlling MOSFETs
for precise current balancing. Low-voltage and high-temperature
protection circuits as well as a temperature-compensated relax-
ation oscillator are all integrated to complete the driver design
and reduce the overall cost for practical applications. The chip
is designed in a TSMC 0.25-µm 1P3M 60-V high-voltage CMOS
process with a chip size of 1.76 × 1.37 mm2 . The current
mismatch among LED strings is measured to be only ±0.28%
along with four times reduction in lighting flicker.
Index Terms— Current balancing, LED driver, light dimming,
matrix-style digital pulsewidth modulation (DPWM), string
rotation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
L IGHTING applications are responsible for approximately
20% of the energy consumption worldwide [1]. Several
studies in replacing traditional light bulbs were done to further
enhance the lighting system’s efficiency [1]. Initially, LEDs
were used as indicating light in board-level electronics and
transportation signals [1]. As technology progresses, LED
becomes more efficient and more applications with new and
powerful LED-based systems are introduced to deliver at least
up to 50% energy savings compared to the traditional ones,
making LED systems widely used in lighting applications [1].
Manuscript received January 15, 2020; revised April 21, 2020 and
June 9, 2020; accepted June 14, 2020. This work was supported by the
Ministry of Science and Technology under Grant MOST 108-2221-E-011-137.
(Corresponding author: Poki Chen.)
Poki Chen, John Carl Joel S. Marquez, and Ruei-Ting Wang are with
the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, National Taiwan
University of Science and Technology, Taipei 10617, Taiwan (e-mail: poki@
mail.ntust.edu.tw).
Yung-Hsuan Chen is with Wistron, Taipei 106, Taiwan (e-mail:
melissachen0714@gmail.com).
Jiann-Jong Chen and Yuh-Shyan Hwang are with the Department of
Electronic Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei 106,
Taiwan (e-mail: jjchen@ntut.edu.tw; yshwang@ntut.edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this article are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TVLSI.2020.3003520
1063-8210 © 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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1
To obtain more brightness, multiple LEDs are usually used.
Series connection is the simplest method to obtain sufficient
illuminance. However, this method may require a higher
supply voltage to drive all of the LEDs [2], [3]. Multiple
LED strings are advisable to use in order to substantially
lower down the required driving voltage [2]–[4]. However,
another disadvantage arises from this method; the driving
current for each string may vary due to process variations
on LED manufacturing [2]. Since the brightness of LEDs is
directly proportional to its forward current [2], [5], [6], not
only the brightness but also the color temperature in each
string may vary. Even a small mismatch in the LED forward
voltage can result in a significant current imbalance [3].
To solve these problems, current balancing methods must be
adopted to generate almost the same current for each string
[2], [7]. Two types of current balancing methods are typically
used: passive current balancing and active current balancing
[2], [7]. Passive current balancing is usually done by using
passive components such as resistor, capacitor, and inductor.
By using resistors, additional power loss is generated [2].
By using capacitors, an ac source is required [2]. Inductor-
based current balancing is bulky due to large inductor cores
required [2]. Also, there is no current regulation on the
mentioned methods, and it is the reason why passive current
balancing is not widely used.
Active current balancing, on the other hand, requires circuits
such as regulators to regulate the current in each sting. Two
types of active current balancing methods are widely used
presently [2], [6]–[8]. The first is the switched mode regula-
tor based on some switched mode power supply topologies
[2], [5]. It is very efficient; however, the circuit is bulky,
complicated, and expensive [2], [5], [7] since it requires large
components [2]. The second type of active current balancing is
to use linear regulator, which is much simpler than the active
ones [3], [8]. However, the main disadvantage is its power loss
[2], [7] resulting in a lower efficiency. There is even a study [3]
showing a 64-W system composed of three strings producing
a power loss of 1.18 W. One way to reduce power loss is
to apply current mirroring; however, it is possible only with
lower current ratings of modern LEDs. Typical LED current
rating for current balancing is much less than 1 A [8].
Under many circumstances, full brightness is not
required and dimming allows further wattage reduction [1].
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS

Dimming can be used to adjust the LED brightness and

applied to an intelligent lighting system as the automated
response to a specific task, user requirement or environment
[1], [9]. Two types of dimming techniques are commonly
used in LED dimmer circuits. The first is current amplitude
dimming [2], [7] in which the brightness can be adjusted
by simply varying the LED current. However, it results in
serious color shift. Instead, the second type of dimming with
pulsewidth modulation (PWM) is mostly used [2]. Average
current can be effectively varied by adjusting the duty cycle
of the driving pulses. Since the LED current amplitude is
kept constant while conducting, it does not produce any Fig. 1. Block diagram of the conventional LED driver with PWM
color shift. However, PWM may produce flickers that can be dimming [2].
sensed by the human eyes. It is advisable to choose the right
dimming frequency to avoid flickering.
Conventionally, PWM dimming is applied to all strings at
the same time [2]. The load current of LED power supply
is periodically changed from full load to no load. This will
induce large transients over the output voltage of the switched-
mode power supply. These transients may produce large
output voltage ripple that in turn affects the LED current.
A method called phase-shifted PWM (PSPWM) [2], [10], [11] Fig. 2. Current driver with active current balancing [12].
is proposed to reduce the load current variation of the dc–dc
converter. However, it causes one disadvantage, that the fre-
quency of load current variation of the converter is effectively
increased. To reduce the impact of this disadvantage, the
dc–dc converter is required to have a very fast transient
response. A new matrix-style digital PWM (DPWM) LED
driver with precise current matching is proposed in this article
to substantially reduce the total current variation and switching
loss for LED strings. The total current variation and switching
loss are reduced by applying the PWM driving signal to at
most one string at any time. However, due to the nature of
its operation, the lifetime of the LED strings will not be the
same. To balance the lifetime of all LED strings, a string
rotator is added. The string rotator also spreads the light and
heat of each string in space domain. The rest of this article
is organized as follows. Section II reviews the LED drivers
with conventional dimming methods and proposes the matrix-
style DPWM scheme. Section III discusses the implementation Fig. 3. Waveforms of string currents and total current for conventional PWM
and design of the proposed LED driver. Finally, experimental with Irated = 20 mA and brightness = 43%.
results and conclusions are presented in Sections IV and V,
respectively.
transistors that improve the output impedance and protect the
II. PWM D IMMING FOR LED D RIVER current sources constituted by low voltage transistors MLED0 to
MLED3 . The main problem for this topology is the large load
A. Conventional PWM Dimming current variation induced on the dc–dc converter. The load
Fig. 1 shows the typical structure of multistring dimmable current varies from no load to full load in every PWM cycle
LED driver [2]. Four LED strings are used as an easy-to- as illustrated in Fig. 3 with conventional PWM dimming. The
understand example throughout this article. To ensure equal maximum load current variation can be calculated as
brightness, the current flowing through each string should be
equal. Fig. 2 depicts a typical current driver with active current Iload,max = Irated × N (1)
balancing [12], where VREF and RREF are used to set the where Irated and N are the rated LED string current and the
reference current for all strings. M1 acts as a switch to turn number of LED strings correspondingly. It produces unwanted
on and off M3 for PWM dimming. With the help of current transients to the dc–dc converter output. Moreover, the current-
mirrors, the reference current IREF is mirrored to all LED controlling transistors MLED0 to MLED3 will not be exactly
strings as long as the sizes of current-controlling transistors identical after fabrication that may cause brightness variation
MLED0 to MLED3 are identical. M6 to M9 are high voltage and color shift if the design or layout is not good enough.

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CHEN et al.: LOW FLICKER DIMMABLE MULTICHANNEL LED DRIVER
Fig. 4. Waveforms of string currents and total current for PSPWM with
Irated = 20 mA and brightness = 43%.
B. PSPWM Dimming
To overcome the above-mentioned problem, a dimming
method called PSPWM is invented. PSPWM adds a constant
phase shift among the driving waveforms of LED strings as
shown in Fig. 4. It reduces the number of LED strings switched
at the same time and lowers the load current variation to
merely Irated . The optimum phase shift is computed as
360◦
ϕ= . (2)
N
Although the transients of the output voltage of the dc–dc
converter is reduced, the frequency f PSPWM of the load current
variation is increased as
k proposed design, only the row decoder in space domain is
f PSPWM = N × f PWM , except for d = , 0 ≤ k ≤ N (3)
N utilized and the column decoder is replaced with the digital
where f PWM is the operation frequency of conventional PWM
dimming, and d is the applied duty cycle. Equation (3) is
concluded from Irated (ωt) derived by adding all of the LED
currents in their Fourier series form that results to
∞
2Irated
Itotal (ωt) = N Irated d + sin( j Nπd) cos( j Nωt) (4)
j =1
jπ
where ω is the PWM driving signal’s angular frequency. With
special cases of d shown in (3), the sine function in the Fourier
coefficient will yield to zero f PSPWM . The more LED strings
are driven in the system, the higher frequency of load current
variation will become, thus complicating the dc–dc converter
design due to the faster transient requirement. Even though
the PWM frequency could be reduced to ease the problem,
it may require extra chip area for larger resistor or capacitor
of the low-cost on-chip relaxation oscillator.
C. Proposed Matrix-Style PWM Dimming
Another drawback from the conventional PWM is that all
of the MOS switches need to be turned on and off every PWM
cycle. Since the MOS switch is usually implemented with
a large transistor, it has tremendous parasitic capacitance to
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3
Fig. 5. Evolution from (a) conventional PWM to (b) MSPWM with
exemplified 65% brightness emulating and (c) original 2-D matrix-style DAC
decoder.
cause great switching loss which can be lowered by reducing
the number of switches in operation for each PWM cycle.
A brand new but simple idea evolved from the matrix
decoding applied to high accuracy DAC [13] is proposed
to reduce switching loss as revealed in Fig. 5(a) and (b).
Fig. 5(c) portrays the original decoder structure of the high-
speed current-steering DAC which consists of both row and
column decoders to turn on or off the current cells in the
matrix. It makes the structure 2-D in space domain. In the
pulsewidth modulator in time domain to switch at most one
LED string periodically for a specific input. On the contrary,
all the current cells in Fig. 5(c) are either ON or OFF unless
there is a change in the input. The operation principles and
circuit implementation are quite different between matrix-
style PWM (MSPWM) and DAC decoder. The ON times of
all strings in conventional PWM are accumulated to turn on
the strings sequentially in the new MSPWM. Only when the
duty cycle of a specific string reaches 100% can the rest
accumulated ON time passed to the next string. The PWM
signal only needs to be applied to at most one LED string and
the other strings are either fully ON or OFF. The number of
fully ON LED strings can be derived as
d × N  (5)
where d is the duty cycle and  is the floor function outputting
the greatest integer less than or equal to d × N. The rest of
accumulated ON time will be applied to the next LED string
with a duty cycle of
dMS = d × N − d × N . (6)
All the other LED strings will be OFF. The switching loss is
reduced since there is only one LED string switched every
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS
Fig. 6. Waveforms of string currents and total current for MSPWM with
Irated = 20 mA and brightness = 43%.
Fig. 7. Duty cycles versus overall brightness for LED strings.
PWM cycle. Moreover, no increase in load current variation
frequency is required. Compared to PSPWM, the load current
variation frequency is lowered by N times to further reduce
the settling time requirement of the power supply as derived
in the following:
f MSPWM = f PWM = f PSPWM /N.
It will reduce the transient requirements in the dc–dc converter
powering the LED strings. Moreover, at special values of
brightness with dMS = 0, such as 25%, 50%, and 75% for
four-string case, no LED string will be switched which is
impossible for PSPWM.
An MSPWM example with 43% duty cycle is simulated
in Fig. 6 to get the first string ON, the second string PWM-
modulated with 72% duty cycle and the rest two strings OFF
as predicted by (5) and (6) since (100% + 72% + 0% + 0%)/
4 = 43%.
The main problem caused with this approach is the lifespans
of all LED strings will be different. As the dimmed brightness
simulated in Fig. 7, the probabilities to turn on LED strings
differ a lot, and the average duty cycle of the i th LED string
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TABLE I
C OMPARISON A MONG PWM D IMMING M ETHODS
can be calculated as
1 1 2(N − i ) − 1
Di = 0.5 + (N − i − 1) = ,
N N 2N
0≤i ≤ N −1 (8)
where a uniform distribution is assumed for dimmed
brightness. The LED string with smaller sequence number
operates more frequently and owns shorter lifespan. It will
cause a serious brightness deviation among LED strings after
long time operation. To solve the problem, a string rotator
to rotate the sequence numbers among strings is required
to equalize their duty cycles during operation and will be
explained in detail in Section III. In addition to lifespan
equalization of all strings, the string rotator also helps in
spreading the light and heat evenly in space domain.
For easy comprehension, Table I compares the proposed
MSPWM scheme to its prior arts in performance for multiple
LED string system, whereas Fmax is the maximum switching
frequency of a conventional digital pulsewidth modulator, and
M is the number of input bits applied on a conventional digital
pulsewidth modulator. These merits will be further discussed
in Section III.
D. Flicker Comparison
According to IEEE standard 1789-2015, flicker is defined
as the change in the luminous flux of a light source due
to fluctuations in the voltage of the power supply [14].
To properly compare the flicker performance, flicker metrics,
(7)
such as percent flicker (Mod%) and flicker index, are evaluated
for each PWM method. Fig. 8 is a reference diagram for the
definition of flicker metrics.
Percent flicker, also known as peak-to-peak contrast, or
modulation depth [14], is defined as
A−B
%Flicker = × 100% (9)
A+B
where A and B are, respectively, the maximum and minimum
luminance in Fig. 8. On the other hand, Flicker Index is defined
as the ratio of the area above the average line to the total
area of the luminance curve for a single cycle which can be
observed from Fig. 8 as
Area1
F.I. = . (10)
Area1 + Area2
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CHEN et al.: LOW FLICKER DIMMABLE MULTICHANNEL LED DRIVER
Fig. 8. Reference diagram for the flicker metric definition [14].
Fig. 9. Percent flicker evaluation versus the duty cycle of conventional PWM,
PSPWM, and MSPWM, respectively.
For constant current driving, the overall luminance is pro-
portional to the total current of LED strings. The flicker
metrics can be easily calculated by utilizing the total current
waveforms from Figs. 3, 4, and 6. However, this assumption
does not consider the LED string spacing and the distance
where the actual illuminance is evaluated. These distances and
spacing will introduce additional flicker to both PSPWM
and MSPWM. To evaluate its effect on flicker, percent flicker
and flicker index are calculated and plotted versus the duty
cycle with MATLAB as shown in Figs. 9 and 10. The distance
of the evaluation point to the PCB substrate and the LED
spacing were assumed to be 15 and 1.5 cm as illustrated in
Fig. 11. As observed in both Figs. 9 and 10, the effect of
the LED string’s position on the PCB substrate is negligible
to the flicker metrics as long as the measurement point is
far enough from the PCB substrate, and the LED strings are
placed quite near to each other which is the usual case for
lighting applications.
It can be clearly seen that the flicker performance of both
PSPWM and MSPWM are the same and far superior to the
conventional one. IC design engineers now have another good
and brand-new option for designing LED drivers from the
perspectives of flicker performance.
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5
Fig. 10. Flicker index evaluation versus the duty cycle of conventional PWM,
PSPWM, and MSPWM, respectively.
Fig. 11. Setup that simulates the distances and spacing.
III. C IRCUIT I MPLEMENTATION
A. LED Driver Architecture
The proposed driver is shown in Fig. 12. The bandgap
reference produces a constant voltage VREF which is insen-
sitive to temperature variation. The reference current IREF is
designed as
IREF = VREF /RT (11)
where RT is an off-chip resistor to set the LED string current.
Current mirrors are adopted for current balancing. Transistor
MC2 is designed to be much smaller than M0–M3 to reduce
the power consumption of the bias network. On the contrary,
the currents through M0–M3 is amplified to 20 mA for LED
driving. Moreover, transistors M0 to M3 were designed to be
large enough to reduce the ON-resistance, r ON , which, in effect,
will reduce the conduction losses. Monte Carlo simulation
with a sample size of 1000 at all five process corners over a
wide temperature range of −40 ◦ C to 150 ◦ C was performed
to accomplish merely −0.037% to 0.043% current deviation.
The impact of random mismatch is minimal for this design.
However, due to large transistor size, the impact of systematic
mismatch will be worsened.
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS
Fig. 12. LED driver with matrix-style DPWM and string rotator.
Fig. 13. Fourth-order common centroid layout pattern for M0–M3.
Moreover, with unbalanced LED string currents, the pres-
ence of string rotator will produce a subharmonic flicker.
If the rotation frequency is set to be the maximum, f PWM ,
the frequency of subharmonic flicker can be derived as
f PWM
fSUB = . (12)
N
If the strings are rotated per R PWM cycles, the subharmonic
frequency will be decreased to
f PWM
f SUB = . (13)
R×N
To reduce the impact of the subharmonic flicker, LED currents
should be matched as much as possible. For perfect cur-
rent balancing, the innovative fourth-order central symmetric
layout [15] is adopted to precisely match M0–M3 as plotted
in Fig. 13. On the other hand, the rotation can be designed
to be once per power ON to totally remove the subharmonic
flicker.
To drive more than ten LEDs per string, VLED is set to
be 35 V. The cascoding transistors M4–M7 need to be realized
with high voltage MOSFETs since they are required to protect
the low-side MOSFETs M0 to M3 which control the LED
string currents. To get enough voltage margin for operation,
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Fig. 14. Matrix-style DPWM controller with string rotator.
a TSMC 0.25-μm 1P3M 60-V high-voltage CMOS process is
used for circuit design and 5-V VDD is required to power the
core circuit. The resolution of DPWM controller is set to be
8 bits for good dimming capability. The DPWM frequency is
designed as 200 Hz which is high enough to make the flicker
undetectable by human eyes according to vision persistence
in accordance with IEEE standard 1789-2015 [14]. If higher
dimming frequency is required, it only needs to reduce the
resistance or capacitance used in the on-chip relaxation oscil-
lator which will also reduce the overall chip area.
Additional protection circuits, such as overtemperature pro-
tection circuit (OTP) and undervoltage lockout circuit (UVLO)
[15], [16], are added to complete the design.
B. MSPWM Controller
Fig. 14 depicts the block diagram of MSPWM along with
the string rotator. For simplification, only 5 bits instead of
full 8 bits are illustrated for the input. The most significant
input bits are used to activate the fully ON LED strings
through the help of row decoder which is actually a binary-to-
thermometer decoder. The rest least significant input bits are
applied to DPWM generator whose output dpwm will be used
to modulate the duty cycle of the LED string next to the fully
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CHEN et al.: LOW FLICKER DIMMABLE MULTICHANNEL LED DRIVER
Fig. 15. DPWM selector for the ith string.
Fig. 16. String rotator.
ON strings. The rest LED strings will be fully OFF . In Fig. 14,
those two most significant bits are 01 and only the first LED
string is fully ON. Since three least significant bits are 100,
the duty cycle becomes 4/23 = 50% to modulate the second
LED string. The rest strings are fully OFF.
Since only the least significant bits instead of all the input
bits are used in the modulator of MSPWM, its LED string
switching frequency is N times lower than the prior arts’ with
the same clock frequency. It means its maximum operational
frequency can be N times higher than the prior arts’ with the
same technology. We have
FMSPWM,max = N × Fmax
where Fmax is the maximum switching frequency for conven-
tional PWM and PSPWM as summarized in Table I. On the
other hand, MSPWM is able to achieve log2 (N) more input
bits than the prior arts’ if the same LED switching frequency
is applied.
1) Digital Pulsewidth Modulator: The simplest among
DPWM architectures presented in [17]–[19] is the one that
emulates an analog PWM that mainly requires a periodic ramp
signal and a comparator. In this design, an up-counter that
represents the periodic ramp signal, and a digital comparator
are used. The output dpwm is set at the beginning of each
DPWM cycle and reset when up counter reaches the value of
least significant bits.
2) DPWM Selector: Two most significant bits are converted
to a thermometer code R[3:0] which is used by the DPWM
selector to transfer the signal, dpwm, to the correct LED
string. The detailed circuit of DPWM selector corresponding
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7
Fig. 17. Temperature-compensated CMOS relaxation oscillator [20].
to the i th LED string is depicted in Fig. 15 which is modified
from the current cell decoder in [13]. If the corresponding
thermometer code Ri is 1, the output DPWMi will be set to 1
by OR gate to fully turn on the corresponding LED string.
If Ri is 0 and the former code Ri−1 is 1, it indicates the
current string succeeds fully ON LED strings and needs to be
modulated by the dpwm signal with DPWMi = dpwm. If both
Ri and Ri−1 are 0, DPWMi will be set to 0 to fully turn off
the corresponding LED string.
3) LED String Rotator: LED string rotator shown
in Fig. 16 is created to equalize the lifespans of all LED string.
It is composed of four multiplexers with their input shuffled to
emulate the sequence rotation. The outputs of the multiplexers
can be characterized by
   
LEDi = DPWMi%4 · S0 · S1 + DPWM(i+1)%4 · S0 · S1
   
+ DPWM(i+2)%4 · S0 · S1 + DPWM(i+3)%4 · S0 · S1
(15)
where % is the modulo division operator.
4) On-Chip Oscillator: A low cost and low power on-chip
temperature-compensated CMOS relaxation oscillator [20] is
integrated as shown in Fig. 17. A threshold-referenced current
source is used to generate a bias current to alternatively charge
and discharge a floating capacitor through the help of an RS
(14) latch in the feedback path that controls the direction of the
current flowing through the capacitor. The oscillator frequency
is derived as

VthS1 + 2I
1 μn Cox (W/L) S1
fCLK = (16)
2(R1 + R2 )C Vth5 + Vth6
where VthS1 , Vth5 , and Vth6 are, respectively, the threshold
voltages of MOSFETs MS1, M5, and M6; (W /L)S1 is the
aspect ratio of MS1; and I is the charging/discharging cur-
rent of the capacitor. If I is very small (e.g., ∼100 nA)
and (W /L)S1 is large enough, the square root term can be
neglected [20]. If M5, M6, and MS1 are properly matched,
their temperature coefficients can be canceled by each other.
Similarly, if resistors with positive and negative temperature
coefficients are used for R1 and R2 to cancel their temperature
sensitivities, a first-order temperature compensation for the
oscillation frequency can be attained [20]. However, only
p-type poly resistor with negative temperature coefficient is
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8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS
Fig. 18. Micrograph of the LED driver.
Fig. 19. Measured driving waveforms of the proposed LED driver with
dimming brightness of (a) 14.1%, (b) 30.1%, (c) 67.2%, and (d) 96.1%.
used due to its much higher sheet resistance than the n-type
resistor with positive temperature coefficient. The resistor
layout area is thus reduced for cost saving at the expense of
a little bit positive temperature sensitivity for the oscillation
frequency.
The required oscillation frequency can be derived as
f osc = f DPWM × 2n
where in this case, n is the number of least significant
input bits applied to DPWM generator. The nominal dimming
frequency f DPWM is set to be 200 Hz and the on-chip oscillator
frequency is designed as 12.8 kHz accordingly which can be
substantially increased by reducing R1 , R2 , or C for higher
dimming frequency and further layout area reduction.
IV. M EASUREMENT R ESULTS
To verify the circuit functionalities, a prototype of the
proposed LED driver was fabricated in a TSMC 0.25-μm
1P3M 60-V high-voltage CMOS process with a chip area
of 1.76 × 1.37 mm2 . The micrograph of the chip is shown
in Fig. 18.
To clearly demonstrate the proposed MSPWM operation,
Fig. 19 shows the measured LED driving waveforms for
different brightness levels with the string rotator disabled. The
digital inputs for these waveforms are 00100100, 01001101,
10101100, and 11110110. In Fig. 19(a), the duty cycle of
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Fig. 20. Measured driving waveforms with 67.2% brightness and string rota-
tion period TROT of (a) TDPWM , (b) 2TDPWM , (c) 4TDPWM , and (d) 8TDPWM .
Fig. 21. Measured LED current deviation.
LED0 is measured as 56.41%. All the other strings are
OFF as predicted by (5) and (6). The overall brightness is
(56.41% + 0% + 0% + 0%)/4 = 14.1% which is exactly
equal to 00100100/28. Similarly, the measurements shown
in Fig. 19(b)–(d) are all also consistent with (5) and (6). The
theoretical study of the proposed MSPWM is thus validated.
To get better conception of proposed string rotation,
the rotation period was set to be 1×, 2×, 4× and 8× of the
DPWM period, respectively, as measured in Fig. 20(a)–(d).
(17) The string rotation can be easily observed. The maximum
recommended rotation frequency is the same as the PWM
frequency as illustrated in Fig. 20(a). Beyond that, the switch-
ing loss will be increased too much to attain all the benefits
of the proposed method. On the other hand, the minimum
rotation frequency recommended is to rotate the strings only
once after power ON for some applications, such as lighting,
to further reduce switching loss. However, it needs some
nonvolatile memory to keep the rotation information. Even
without memory, the rotation period can be easily set with
much flexibility from seconds to minutes to fit the application
needs.
To measure the current deviation among LED strings,
eight fabricated chips were tested. As shown in Fig. 21,
the maximum current deviation is merely −0.28% to 0.27%.
It convinces the effectiveness of the fourth-order common
centroid layout pattern for current matching.
The DPWM frequency at room temperature is measured
as 182.4 Hz which is deviated from the nominal value
by −8.8% according to process variation but is still high
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
CHEN et al.: LOW FLICKER DIMMABLE MULTICHANNEL LED DRIVER
TABLE II
P ERFORMANCE C OMPARISON
Fig. 22. Measured DPWM frequency over temperature.
enough to make the flicker undetectable by human eyes.
For temperature sensitivity, the DPWM frequency was mea-
sured over −40 ◦ C to 120 ◦ C temperature range as presented
in Fig. 22 to get a temperature coefficient of 277 ppm/◦ C
which can be further reduced by using resistors with both
positive and negative temperature coefficients.
Table II concludes the performance of the proposed LED
driver along with its prior arts for easy comparison. With the
newly proposed matrix-style DPWM dimming, the number of
strings switched is reduced to single one while the others need
to modulate all of the LED strings. Furthermore, the driver is
fully integrated with peripheral circuits such as the oscilla-
tor, bandgap reference, and protection circuits. Compared to
prior arts, the proposed driver has the least current deviation
between strings. It demonstrates the superiority of the layout
pattern used in the current balancing circuit.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this article, an LED driver with the matrix-style DPWM
dimming and string rotation is presented. There is at most
one string modulated by the DPWM signal for switching
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9
loss reduction. Comparing to conventional PWM dimming
methods, the proposed architecture achieves the least variation
in load current and minimum switching frequency at the same
time to greatly reduce the switching loss and the transient
response requirement over the dc–dc converter. The lifespans
of all LED strings are balanced successfully by string rota-
tion. All required components are fully integrated to reduce
the overall cost for practical applications. Not only are the
important design parameters derived, but all simulated results
are also consistent with the measured ones. With a fourth-
order common centroid layout pattern for current balancing,
the current deviation among LED strings is measured to be
merely ±0.28%. This work is the most complete and achieves
the least current deviation and minimum switching loss.
With the inherent merits and easy implementation, this new
MSPWM can be applied to the other high-end applications,
such as visible light communication, high-resolution DPWM,
and nonlinear dimming.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Taiwan Semicon-
ductor Research Institute (TSRI), Hsinchu, Taiwan, for chip
fabrication.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VERY LARGE SCALE INTEGRATION (VLSI) SYSTEMS
Poki Chen (Member, IEEE) was born in Chi-
ayi, Taiwan, in 1963. He received the B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Electrical Engi-
neering Department, National Taiwan University
(NTU), Taipei, Taiwan, in 1985, 1987, and 2001,
respectively.
From 1998 to 2001, 2001 to 2006, and 2006 to
2011, he was a Lecturer, an Assistant Professor, and
an Associate Professor, respectively, with the Elec-
tronic Engineering Department, National Taiwan
University of Science and Technology (NTUST),
Taipei, where he is currently a Professor with the Electronic and Computer
Engineering Department. His research interests include analog/mixed-signal
IC design and layout with special focus on time-domain signal processing cir-
cuits, such as time-domain smart temperature sensor, time-to-digital converter
(TDC), digital pulse generator (DTC), time-domain ADC, and high-accuracy
DAC. He is also interested in creating innovative analog applications for field-
programmable gate array (FPGA) platforms, such as FPGA smart temperature
sensor, and FPGA digital-to-time converter and TDC.
Dr. Chen has been serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE T RANS -
ACTIONS ON V ERY L ARGE S CALE I NTEGRATION (VLSI) S YSTEMS and
IEEE A CCESS since 2011 and 2013. He has been the Organizer of the
IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Green Building and Smart
Grid (IGBSG) since 2014 and serves as a keynote/invited speaker, a TPC
Member, and a Session Chair for various IEEE conferences, such as SOCC,
VLSI-DAT, IFEEC, ISESD, NoMe TDC, ISNE, and ASID.
Yung-Hsuan Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan,
in 1992. She received the B.S. degree in electri-
cal engineering from Yuan Ze University, Taoyuan,
Taiwan, in 2014, and the M.S. degree in electronic
and computer engineering from the National Tai-
wan University of Science and Technology, Taipei,
in 2016.
She is currently with Wistron, Taipei. Her
research interests include digital pulsewidth modu-
lator (DPWM) and LED driver design.
John Carl Joel S. Marquez (Graduate Student
Member, IEEE) was born in Bulacan, Philippines,
in 1996. He received the B.S. degree in electronics
engineering from the University of Santo Tomas,
Manila, Philippines, in 2017. He is currently work-
ing toward the M.S. degree in electronic and com-
puter engineering at the National Taiwan University
of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan.
From 2017 to 2018, he was a Lecturer with the
Electronics Engineering Department, University of
Santo Tomas. His research interests include on-chip
solar cell design, power IC design for energy-harvesting applications, and
LED driver design.
Ruei-Ting Wang was born in Taipei, Taiwan,
in 1996. He received the B.S. degree in electronic
engineering from the National Kaohsiung University
of Science and Technology, Kaohsiung, Taiwan,
in 2018. He is currently working toward the M.S.
degree in electronic and computer engineering at the
National Taiwan University of Science and Technol-
ogy, Taipei.
His research interests include field-programmable
gate array (FPGA)-based time domain devices, such
as time-to-digital converter (TDC) and digital-to-
time converter (DTC).
Jiann-Jong Chen, photograph and biography not available at the time of
publication.
Yuh-Shyan Hwang, photograph and biography not available at the time of
publication.