Colour display drivers target wireless handsets

Dialog Semiconductor has entered a new product area by offering colour display driver ICs for wireless handsets to its customers in this key target market.

Dialog Semiconductor has entered a new product area by offering colour display driver ICs for wireless handsets to its customers in this key target market.

Aimed at the growing number of colour display handset manufacturers in Asia, the new products are available from Dialog Semiconductor as a result of technology licensed from Optrex, and Motif, a joint venture between Motorola and InFocus Corp.

The new display driver ICs complement the Dialog Semiconductor devices already available for the wireless handset market - these include integrated power management and audio ICs, CMOS image sensors and modules, and ASICs.

Roland Pudelko, CEO and President, said: "We have developed a family of colour STN LCD drivers with resolutions up to 64K true colours.

With agreements in place for intellectual property licensed from Optrex and Motif, development partners are already identified which will enable us to introduce our first display driver ICs this quarter.

The key market for these products is in Asia, where Dialog is seeing significant growth and where we are already in discussions with customers for the driver ICs".

As mobile phone users demand the ability to get more information from their display particularly as a result of video and gaming capabilities, the display and the display driver become critical elements in the overall system.

According to Allen Nogee, Principal Analyst responsible for wireless component technology at market research firm In-Stat/MDR, cost continues to be the main issue.

He comments: "People want colour phones that can present much more information but without increasing handset size, while the carriers' goal is to generate revenue.

Add to this a trend towards incorporating two displays in a handset, and you have a combination of pressures demanding low cost components and low power consumption, but high resolution and performance.

The phone handset size will not grow, but more and more features will be squeezed onto the small display".

This demand for higher performance full colour, high speed moving images is the reason why Dialog Semiconductor licensed the multiline addressing (MLA) LCD technology, the key benefit of which is faster response time compared with conventional passive matrix displays.

Optrex' MLA was originally developed for the successful i-mode Internet access mobile phones in Japan, and enables fast response time, high brightness, lower cost and lower power consumption compared with thin film transistor (TFT) LCDs.

Displays using MLA technology support moving images at speeds faster than 15 frames per second while maintaining very low power consumption.

Roland Pudelko said: "This technology fits perfectly with our overall strategy of exploiting our technology base and core competence to provide products and solutions for low power applications like mobile phone handsets.

In particular, our expertise in mixed signal design and power management, together with high performance, high voltage analogue circuit design, is relevant to our LCD driver product family, which will be available in a variety of display sizes and colour resolutions".

Pudelko adds: "Over the next 2-3 years, the worldwide subscriber base for mobile phones is estimated to reach in excess of two billion, which in turn will drive demand for handset sales.

When you put all the trends together for the handset itself - such as colour displays replacing black and white, dual displays for the popular clamshell formats, and the growth in digital camera phones - then the combination of our display driver ICs with image sensing components and modules places us in an excellent position to provide the semiconductor technology solutions needed to address these new end-user demands".

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