The improvement of LED lighting efficiency has been amazing in the past few years. One important revolution of this century is going to be installing LED into everyone’s life, replacing traditional light bulbs. LED displays first appeared in the solid light source revolution, and now, it is everywhere, such as shopping district, sport stadium, high way, and wherever the electricity can reach. These huge LED displays stand themselves as the early indication of the LED revolution.

Nevertheless, the power dissipation density of a LED display (~kwatt/m2) is still significant, which bothers the head of LED display. For example, a 5x5 m2 LED panel turned on for 16 hours per day will cost a monthly bill of 12,000$RMB in Peijing, 30,000$NT in Taipei, and 210,000 $Yen in Tokyo. A straight approach to cut down the bill will be using LED’s low forward voltage and reducing driver IC’s supply voltage. In order to reach this goal, first, the vendors supply brighter LED with lower forward voltage, 2.8~3.2V or even lower.  Second, the LED driver IC is capable of performing at lower voltage supply than conventional 5V setting.

Glandtex is a new power management IC design company in Taiwan.  The designers in Glandtex with power budget in mind have delivered a 16 channel LED display driver IC, GD1051. The maximum current rating is 90nm per channel, and LED driving current is set through an external resistor. To sustain the constant current driving at a fixed external resistor setting, GD1051 work with voltage supply ranging from 5.0V to 3.3V power supply at 50mA or below.  This GD1051 is an energy saving champion for LED display system.

Besides energy saving, GD1051 is as good as a video quality booster.  With company’s unique “Driving Current Acceleration” technology, the driving current rising time is as short as ~10nsec, which is much faster than the market dominator now.  It allows the LED display to operate at higher frame rate with 2~4 more additional grey levels.