Employing Drain-Bias Dependent Electrical Characteristics of Poly-Si TFTs to Improve Gray Level Control in Low Power AMOLED Displays

With development of high efficiency organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), and high mobility polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) thin-film transistors (TFTs), low power and high resolution active matrix OLED (AMOLED) displays are becoming popular for mobile applications. However, they suffer from poor control of lower gray levels, with the driving TFT being operated in the subthreshold regime. In this paper, with help of non-ideal drain-bias dependent electrical characteristics of poly-Si TFTs, operation of the driving TFT can be moved out from the subthreshold regime to allow better control of the gray levels. As a result, a dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) method is developed, and shown to be able to improve the luminous uniformity for better image quality, while effectively reducing the static power consumption.