4:QOpm- 430gm (Invited)

Driving Circuit for Organic LED Dot-Matrix Display

Yoshiyuki Okuda, Hideo Ochi, Masami Tsuchida
Pioneer Electronics Carp, Saitama, JAPAN
Introduction
The structure of an Organic LED
element is shown in Fig.1.
This element consists of a cathode
of a metallic electrode, an anode of
a transparent electrode, and an
P-1
organic fluorescent thin film of an I t
organic compound layer (FL) or more
and an organic positive-hole transport
layer (HTL) which are layered between
the cathode and the anode. J I J J
The electrical characteristics are shown EMISSION

in Fig.2 and Fig.3. Fig. 1 The Structure of the OLED

The luminance is proportional to the forward current density and the relation is
temperature immune. However, the function of the forward current vs. the voltage is
non-linear and temperature dependent.

2oooo 7
-E
2U
Y

3
Cu r r e n t [mA/mmz] Voltage [VI
Fig. 2 Luminance vs. Current Fig.3 Current vs. Voltage

Dot-Matrix Display and Driving System

The driving system for dot-matrix display is shown in Fig.4. I t is called a passive matrix
driving system in which anode lines and cathode lines are disposed in a grid and
Organic LED luminous elements are connected at each intersection. The display
consists of 256x64 dots' display area. Anode lines are connected to independent constant
current sources with switching function. Cathode lines are connected to toggle-switches
that are functional as a scanning circuit. The scanning circuit applies a ground (OW
sequentially to the cathode lines at a fixed time interval. The anode line driving circuits
supply driving current to the anode lines by controlling onloff in synchronism with the
scanning of the switches of the cathode line scanning circuit. In this way a luminous
element of the desired intersection is supplied its driving current timely. The frame rate
is lOms, so the time of a scanning a line is about 156 ,U s. The response time of an
element. luminance vs. current is less than 1,U S. So we can control luminance of each
01997 E E E
0-7803-3895-U97/$10.00 362

Authorized licensed use limited to: DRDO- ADA. Downloaded on November 05,2022 at 11:31:05 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 element by switching each current sources, what is called “pulse-width-modulation”.
For instance, the current sources are switched 64 cycles per a line scanning period, we
can get 64 steps of luminance on each element.

Dr i v e cu.rrent

ED p i x e l

Fig.4 The Driving System of Dot-Matrix Display

The Problem associated with Driving

There is following difficulty in driving the passive matrix Organic LED panel. The
luminous element cannot emit light unless a voltage builds up above a specified value.
However, each of the elements may be represented by a luminous element E having a
diode characteristic and a parasitic capacitor C connected with it in parallel as shown
by an equivalent circuit in Fig.5. The parasitic capacitors of all of luminous elements
connected to a n anode line have to be charged for one of the luminous elements to emit
light. So the real response time of the driving system is longer than 1U
, s. Thus, we have

devised a system that charges up the parasitic capacitors of all the anode lines.

Fig.5 Equivalent Circuit of OLED

363

Authorized licensed use limited to: DRDO- ADA. Downloaded on November 05,2022 at 11:31:05 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.