10/2/2019 How-to design LED signage and LED matrix displays, Part 3 | EDN

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How-to design LED signage and LED matrix displays, Part

3
MASASHI NOGAWA -September 03, 2014
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Part 1 of this three-part series introduced the technical and engineering steps necessary to
design an LED display system from individual LED lamps. Part 2 provided the remaining steps
needed to implement a basic LED display. In the third and concluding installment of this tutorial,
we'll explore some of the issues which affect the image quality and reliability of LED displays.
We'll also become acquainted with the technologies and design techniques commonly used to
deal with them.

Anti-ghosting/ghost-canceling/pre-charge FETs

Ghosting, spike noise, or phantom noise are unwanted lighting effects caused by Anode gate
"float" which can occur in time-multiplexed LED driver. Since LED lamps (PN junction of diodes)
have relatively high levels of capacitance, their residual charge can keep triggering capacitive
charge transfers between the floating nodes. And every time there's forward electron flow through
a PN junction

The situation where this phenomenon is most is a diagonal line image. Figure 1b shows an
example of so-called "ghosting" caused by anode float. Modern LED driver ICs, such as the
TLC59283, employ so-called "pre-charge FET" circuits which eliminate these ghosting effects
(Figure 1a). As explained earlier, the root cause of ghosting is stray charges on the LED's anode
which forward-bias its PN junction and cause it to light at unwanted times. These pre-charge
FETs are designed to insure the LED lamps remain reverse-biased and unlit except when the
driver circuit is actually on.

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Figure 1 Pre-charge FETs (right) and the ghosting (left).

Blank bands, black bands and Enhanced spectrum PWM

LED display designers face several other challenges as they strive to produce ever-larger
products which deliver the pest-possible image quality. One of the biggest issues is eliminating
the blank bands which can occur when capturing the image of an LED display on a camera. As
we discussed in Part 1 of this series, this is caused by "slow-synching" between the display and
the camera. This can be avoided by using a faster frame refresh rate (FRR). Unfortunately, larger
displays require faster FRRs. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve an FRR
that's sufficiently high to avoid slow-synching effects as display size increases.

Another issue is black bands which appear when a camera captures a display image image at the
moment some of its LEDs are OFF. This can be avoided by keeping the LED lamps ON during a
camera scan period but, as the following example will show, that's not always possible.

Black bands become a more significant problem as PWM control LED ICs grow to control larger,
higher-quality displays where the length of their PWM operation cycle time grows longer. For
example, the latest 16-bit PWM control with a 25 MHz reference clock requires 2.6 ms = 216 bit /
25 MHz, which is a frame refresh rate of 381 Hz. Here, a gray scale code of 128 for a total of 216
clock cycles generates 5.1 us (= 128 / 25 MHz) of ON time, and 2.6 ms minus 5.1 us of OFF
time. The camera captures LED lamps in the OFF state during this 2.6 ms period.

Black-banding can be mitigated using a technique called enhanced-spectrum PWM (ES-PWM), a

method for PWM generation which divides one long PWM cycle into shorter sub-PWM cycles. In
the above example, if 128 clocks of the ON period are divided into 16 periods of 8 clocks each,
creating an effective FRR of 6 kHz (= 381 Hz x 16). At 6 kHz, the refresh rate is high enough to
avoid black bands with most cameras.

An original PWM code cannot always be equally divided. In this situation, the ES PWM function
splits one ON period into rounded integers. For instance, to divide a gray scale code of 100 into
16 pieces, the ES-PWM circuit generates twelve of 6 clocks and four of 7 clocks to maintain a
total gray scale of 100 (= 6 clock x 12 + 7 clock x 4).

Detecting LED open, LED short, & output leakage conditions

Many LED display systems are controlled remotely, making it difficult for an operator to detect any
failures. Because the human eye is sensitive to a faulty lamp that remains constantly ON or OFF,
the failure of even a few lamps can degrade the quality of a viewer's video experience. As a
result, many displays implement ways to detect open and shorted LEDs, as well as output
leakage conditions which can cause LEDs to malfunction.
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An LED open detector (LOD) function monitors LED lamps for open-circuit failures. Under normal
circumstances, a driver IC’s constant-current output terminal stays at the head room voltage
required by the constant-current circuit. When the constant-current circuit's LED fails and
becomes an open circuit, the constant-current circuit drives its output terminal to almost zero
voltage. The LOD function detects these telltale voltage changes and generates an error signal.

Similarly, an LED short detection (LSD) monitors the LED lamp for conditions which indicate the
LED, and/or its driver are short-circuited to its anode's supply voltage. When the LED fails in a
shorted mode, its output terminal reverts from its normal bias state to the full voltage applied to
the anode. The LSD function distinguishes this voltage difference and generates an alarm signal.

An output leakage detection (OLD) differs slightly from the first two safety functions. It's designed
to detect conditions which arise when an LED is forced into its ON state due to debris forming a
conduction path from an output terminal to the ground. When this occurs, the LED is turned ON –
no matter what the output of its constant current-circuit driver happens to be. The OLD element
produces a small amount of current at its output terminal node which it uses detect any leakage
path by monitoring the terminal voltage.

Low gray scale enhancement

The human eye has more sensitivity to darker light sources than brighter lights. In other words, it
recognizes which of two dark light sources emits more photons. However, when the human eye is
saturated with bright light from two different sources, it cannot distinguish the difference.

For handling video image, low gray scale data requires more attention. Here a technique like
gamma correction is widely used. As for LED display systems, software programming can
implement a gamma correction function with both ON/OFF and PWM control drivers.

Recent LED drivers, like the TLC5958, integrates more proactive improvements on low gray scale
handling. A common problem is that red LED lamps are stronger than green and blue with dark
white image output, even though red, green and blue all have the same low gray scale data. This
occurs because red LED lamps can turn ON longer than green and blue lamps due to its lower
forward voltage. A low gray scale enhancement (LGSE) function can correct this difference inside
the IC. Figure 2a has no correction while 2b has been corrected.

Figure 2 Two examples of low gray scale enhancement with both showing dark white image data.

Regarding this low gray scale concern, LED current PWM pulses need very sharp turn-ON and
turn-OFF times, or rise and fall times, TR and TF. If TR and TF are slow, low gray scale problems
can get worse.

"First line" issues and integrated SRAM

As mentioned earlier, ES-PWM control speeds up FFR. By using ES-PWM with the time-
multiplexing anode control, the first line of time-multiplexing gets darker. Figure 6a has two lines
that appear to be more reddish than the others (very top and middle). All other lines look to be
more white. This first line issue is caused when the green and blue lamps are not fully turned ON.
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A solution to the root cause of the first line issue can be found by integrating static RAM (SRAM)
bits to store gray scale PWM codes for the entire frame, thus avoiding data transfer time lag. For
example, the TLC5958 integrates 48 k bits of SRAM on-chip for up to 32 times of multiplexing.

Design tips for display systems and driver ICs

Inrush current control

In general, an LED display system handles huge amounts of current. For example, eight pieces of
48-output LED driver ICs controls 25 mA each. The total current is 9.6A. The biggest problem
with an LED display system is that this 9.6A of current keeps turning ON and OFF at very high
frequency with fast TR and TF.

Many LED driver ICs come with noise reduction features such as delay between each output.
Because a system handles 10 MHz order of digital signal on its PCB, noise management is an
important design factor early into the project.

Thermal error flag/pre-thermal warning

As stated, an LED display system handles huge amounts of current – which translates into huge
amounts of heat. This excessive heat can cause thermal shutdown and unexpectedly stop LEDs
from working. It is a major issue when the entire display stops working, but viewers might think
that the system is simply turned OFF. However, in most cases, only a partial module stops
working and viewers can see that something is wrong (Figure 3). Because of this, many LED
driver ICs do not come with a thermal shutdown function. Instead, they come with a thermal error
flag (TEF) or pre-thermal warning flag (PWF) function.

Figure 3 LED display with some modules inoperative.

These flags are generated by a circuit similar to thermal shutdown detectors. Instead of stopping
an IC when temperatures get hot, hot temperature condition flags are sent to an image
processing controller. Upon receipt of a flag, the controller cools down the system by reducing
screen brightness, showing darker images, or simply stops the system for a moment.

48-output driver

PCB layouts can be nightmarish on a typical LED display module design. We compare system
concept sketches utilizing one 48-output driver (Figure 4a) and three 16-output drivers (Figure
4b). Both diagrams are a 16 x 16 RGB matrix, which equals 768 LED lamps. It is clear that a 48-
output driver like the TLC5958 can simplify your PCB design.
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10/2/2019 How-to design LED signage and LED matrix displays, Part 3 | EDN

(a)

(b)

Figure 4 PCB layout comparison between 48- and 16-output drivers.

With the numerical example specification, key points in IC data transfer calculations are reviewed
as a final step of the LED display system building, which is a continuation of the discussion
started in Part 1. We also visited how various LED display driver features improve video output
quality, plus we examined some tips for making system design easier and more efficient.

References
How-to design LED signage and LED matrix displays (Part 1), EDN, July 30, 2014
How-to design LED signage and LED matrix displays (Part 2), EDN, July 30, 2014
More information about LED signage is available on Texas Instruments' web site.
Download the datasheets of the devices referenced in this article: TLC59283, TLC5958

About the Author

Masashi Nogawa is a product marketing engineer for Texas Instruments’ Power Management
group where he is responsible for the SWIFT product line. Masashi received his BSEE and MSEE
degrees from the University of Electro-communications, Tokyo, and he holds six US patents.
Masashi can be reached at [email protected].
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