Saturday, 21 July 2018

LED Dot Matrix Display Operation




How LED Screen displays an image

The flowchart below shows the sequence of processes that take place in order to display the desired image on a LED display.



So, overall, one row at a time is being displayed, but this process is done so fast, with speed much higher than human eye’s response time (which is >= 10ms) that all of the rows appear to be switched on / lit up. Hence, a complete image is formed on the display.






Larger the number of rows, higher the scan-time

As described earlier that one row of a display is switched-on at a time, so the Scan-rate of a display is the amount of time required to display data pixel on all the rows.

So, what if a LED display of resolution, e.g. 1024x768,768 rows. And the display controller starts from row 1 to row 768 to display one row at a time. The amount of time required for completing one-cycle, or more specifically the ‘Scan-time’, would increase very much and may get even higher than the Human eye’s response time. It would result in the rows of the display being noticed to be switching on & off. This effect can be termed as ‘flickering’. To compensate this increase in scan-time, one would suggest increasing the frequency at which data is clocked in, along with row selection. But this may lead to consequences in term of:

  • Increase in power consumption of the whole system, due to increase in frequency.
  • Increase in hardware cost, due to increase in power supply and components required with higher frequency response.
  • The brightness of the display might be affected by various undesired changes in other parameters.
  • The control card or driver that drives the LED display to display an image may have limitations on scanning frequency.
  • High scan time would lead to lower Frame-refresh rate.

The solution is to limit the scanning to a specific number of rows.  Commonly 1~16 rows in a matrix display are scanned. For additional sets of rows, additional ‘data group’ lines from the controller or LED display driver are connected to shift-in the data in parallel.


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