A real-time approach to thermal design, leveraging display performance in a LED TV

Traditionally the TV is thermal designed by considering the maximum load under the worst case ambient conditions. This approach leaves considerable margin unused under all other use cases and ambient conditions. We present a way to utilize this margin to increase the picture quality while ensuring the design constraints remain fulfilled under all ambient condition and loads. We have embedded a control system in the TV which models thermally critical parameters in real time and adjusts the driving of the TV accordingly to maintain the design constraints. This system tracks and controls the touch temperature, temperature of solderjoints, creep damage of the solderjoints and depreciation of the LED chips. In this paper first the modelling approach and control algorithm are detailed and finally the operation of the control method is confirmed on live video signal.