New overdrive technology for liquid-crystal displays with a simple architecture

Abstract

We propose a new technique to extract overdrive (OD) values that are indispensable to improve response characteristics of liquid-crystal displays. We show the relation among an OD value (DOD), a previous frame data (DPF), and a current frame data (DCF) can be expressed very well by a third-order polynomial. To make the implementation of the OD technology to be simple, we propose to create a base line that is expressed by the third-order equation and to linearly shift it according to DPF. Our proposed method does not need the large size lookup tables (LUTs), whereas the conventional OD technology requests huge LUTs. Thus, our method can be easily implemented by very small circuits, which enables a low-cost solution. Only six measurements in our method are sufficient to obtain OD values of all the transition, whereas the conventional one wants 256 measurements. We investigate the best position of the base line and show how small the deviation from optimum values is. We prove that the proposed OD technology enables a low-cost implementation, high productivity, and high performance.