A versatile micropower high-voltage flat-panel display driver in a 100-V 0.7-μm CMOS intelligent interface technology

A versatile architecture for monolithic low-power high-voltage flat-panel display drivers is presented. A prototype of such a driver chip was designed and fabricated in the 100-V 0.7-μm CMOS intelligent interface technology (I²T) of Alcatel MicroElectronics. It features 100-V output driving capability, while the operation of the entire driver chip is controlled by means of 3- to 5-V digital signals. Special high-voltage level-shifter circuits, based on the dynamic charge control concept, were developed to reduce the internal power consumption of the driver chip to extremely low values of 1 to 2 μW per driver output. A powerful on-chip control unit supports numerous display addressing schemes and very complex multilevel output waveforms can be synthesized. These attractive electrical characteristics, together with the pronounced flexibility and multifunctionality, make this driver architecture ideally suited for a variety of flat-panel displays, especially in battery-powered applications