An intelligent inverter for a high-power LCD backlight

Abstract— To resolve some of the problems encountered in developing a high-power inverter for an LCD backlight with multiple cold-cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs), we developed an intelligent dc-ac inverter unit with the following special functions: (1) stabilization of the power consumption within several minutes of power-on, (2) dispersion of the inrush current at power-on, and (3) low switching noise on the power-source line.     

Design considerations for a CCFL and its surroundings

Abstract— A TFT-LCD module includes a backlight unit, which normally uses one or more thin cold-cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFLs). Since a CCFL is driven at high frequency and high voltage, there is a leakage current. In recent years, TFT-LCD modules have been getting thinner, with a wider screen size and a narrower frame; consequently, the leakage current has come to have a significant influence on the design of the LCD module and the dc/ac inverter unit that generates the high-voltage ac to drive the CCFL. It is actually impossible to probe the inside of a working CCFL because of the high voltage, high frequency, and low electric discharge current. This fact adds to the difficulty of the analysis and the design. This paper proposes an electrical model of a CCFL and a simulation method using the model, making it possible to analyze the inside of the CCFL and to provide some important parameters that are required for the basic design of the LCD module and the dc/ac inverter, before the construction and measurement of actual samples.     

LCD backlights: with or without Hg?

High luminance and efficacy vs. temperature independence and environmental protection: these are the determining factors for the choice of Hg or Xe for LCD backlights. A capacity‐coupled cylindrical Hg discharge lamp attains a luminance of 114,000 cd/m² and an efficacy of 35 lm/W when driven at 5 MHz. On the other hand, a mercury‐free Xe flat discharge backlight produces 11,000 cd/m² and 30 lm/W, with fast luminance response. This paper discusses the underlying limitations assessed to the Hg and Xe backlights, considering application to LC TVs.     

A 30,000-cd/m2, 50-lm/W,and 92%-luminance-uniformity flat discharge fluorescent lamp for LCD backlights

Abstract— A 5.2-in.-diagonal simple-structured argon-mercury cold-cathode flat discharge fluorescent lamp has been developed for LCD backlighting. A pair of insulated electrodes is provided at the top and bottom ends of the inner surface of the front glass plate. Phosphor is deposited on both the front and rear glass plates. A luminance of 30,000 cd/m² and a luminous efficacy of 50 lm/W were obtained with a luminance uniformity of 92% without the use of a diffuser sheet. A mechanism for obtaining the high luminous efficacy is described. Luminance can be dimmed down to 4% of the peak value by extending the pulse interval and/or by reducing the pulse amplitude.     

High‐luminance and luminous‐efficacy mercury‐free flat fluorescent lamp (MFFL) with local‐dimming functionality

Abstract— In order to realize high‐luminance and luminous‐efficacy mercury‐free flat fluorescent lamps (MFFLs) for LCD backlighting, the phosphor profile was optimized to enlarge the surface area. The proposed uneven profile of the rear phosphor increases the effective surface area of the phosphor, resulting in a wide luminance range from 3000 to 16,788 cd/m² with a corresponding high luminous efficacy from 66 to 34.7 lm/W, respectively. Also, a dynamic operation method for an adaptive local‐dimming and scanning operation is proposed which can be used in a 32‐in. multi‐structured configuration having one inverter system. With the deployment of the bipolar drive scheme and dual auxiliary electrodes, a stable and selective diffuse glow discharge with high luminance is possible.     

How to reduce light leakage and clipping in local‐dimming liquid‐crystal displays

Abstract— In conventional LCDs, the backlight is set to maximum luminance regardless of the image. For dark scenes, this approach causes light leakage and power waste. Especially, light leakage in dark scenes degrades the contrast ratio of LCDs; to circumvent this problem, local‐dimming systems have been proposed. In these systems, the LED backlight is divided into several local blocks and the backlight luminance of each local block is controlled individually, and pixel values are adjusted simultaneously according to the luminance profile of the dimmed backlight. In this paper, a method of determining the LED backlight luminance of each local block depending on the image is proposed; this method significantly improves the image quality of LCDs. First, we introduce methods of quantifying light‐leakage at dark gray levels and clipping at bright gray levels. Then, the proposed method to determine the dimming duty, which controls the LED backlight luminance by compromising between these two measures, was derived. The proposed algorithm preserves the original image with little clipping distortion and effectively reduces light leakage.     

Power savings and enhancement of gray‐scale capability of LCD TVs with an adaptive dimming technique

Abstract— The luminance of a backlight unit for an LCD TV is adaptively and locally dimmed along with the input video signal in order to reduce the power consumption and also to improve the picture quality. By adopting the zero‐dimensional (0D), 1D, and 2D adaptive dimming techniques, a sample movie having 8.0% post‐gamma average picture levels (APL) could be displayed using 83%, 71%, and 50% of the original backlight power, respectively. For an adoption of the 2D dimming, an LED backlight is preferable. The adaptive‐dimming technique also allows the differential aging characteristics between the LED components and temperature dependence of color and luminance to be overcome. From simulations of a reduction in power consumption, it was found that 40 × 40 pixels is a unit of the local dimming, 30 frames for the sampling period, 24 dimming steps, and an equal‐signal‐step method for determining the dimming factor have been found to be appropriate. The gray‐scale capability of low‐luminance images can also be improved by dimming the backlight luminance and expanding the input signal. By using an LCD TV having an 8‐bit capability, an 11‐bit‐equivalent gray‐scale expression was experimentally proven.     

An application of PSO technique for harmonic elimination in a PWM inverter

Harmonic elimination problem in PWM inverter is treated as an optimization problem and solved using particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique. The derived equation for computation of total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output voltage of PWM inverter is used as the objective function in the PSO algorithm. The objective function is minimized to contribute the minimum THD in the voltage waveform and the corresponding switching angles are computed. The method is applied to investigate the switching patterns of both unipolar and bipolar case. While minimizing the objective function, the individual selected harmonics like 5th, 7th, 11th and 13th can be controlled within the allowable limits by incorporating the constraints in the PSO algorithm. The results of the unipolar case using five switching angles are compared with that of a recently reported work and it is observed that the proposed method is effective in reducing the voltage THD in a wide range of modulation index. The simulated results are also validated through suitable experiments.     

具有PFC功能的小型逆变MIG焊机研究

对小型逆变MIG焊机中出现的电流畸变问题进行了分析。为了抑制电网谐波电流和提高焊机的功率因数,提出了一种单相有源功率因数校正(APFC)方案,并介绍了其工作原理,通过调试和实验验证了所提方案的可行性。     

Development of high‐brightness flat field‐emission lamp with a special electrode system for block dimming BLUs for LCDs

Abstract— A flat field‐emission lamp (FFEL) has been developed that utilizes a specially designed electrode structure and an unique nanostructure carbon electron emitter called a carbon nanometer electron exit (CNX) emitter. CNX emitters have been developed on metal‐wire substrates with a special plasma chemical‐vapor‐deposition technique. Field electron emission from CNX emitters has been investigated in a vacuum of 2×10^?4 Pa by using a diode configuration with an A–K space of 1 mm, which shows that an emission current of 5.7 A/cm² can be obtained at an electrical‐field strength of 2.2 V/μm. Then, the emission‐current stability was also carried out to investigate the CNX‐emitter lifetime. Also, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and micro‐Raman spectrum was used to characterize the CNX film. Furthermore, the design of the special diode emission system was optimized by simulating the electron orbits with a commercial software, the result of which indicates that the emission system was used to effectively extract electrons from the emitter and control the local block dimming. And, also, a simple FFEL structure was used to illustrate the simulation results. Finally, a 7‐in. FFEL has been successfully fabricated, demonstrating a luminance of 15,000 cd/m² with an anode voltage of 6 kV.     

Transmitting scalable video coding using VLC with color and dimming control to assure QoS

Recently, light emitting diode (LED) technology has been the focus of the information technology and green technology industries.The visible light communication (VLC) system uses LED technology for simultaneous illumination and data transmission. Therefore, the VLC system provides illumination to the user, which can provide both high quality multimedia services and various application services. The main concerns of VLC systems are illumination and bit error rate (BER) performance. Consequently, it is necessary to analyze the illumination control and method of transmitting multimedia data in the VLC system. In this paper, we propose a method to effectively transmit and Red, Green, Blue (RGB) three-color LED to video signal while providing dimming and color control from the VLC system. In the VLC system, LEDs can generate various colors of light by controlling the mixing ratio of each individual RGB color element. Thus, each RGB channel will have a different signal power, and each channel will have different performance. Therefore, we present a novel resource allocation using the RGB channel state information to allocate the multi-layers of video in the VLC system. The conventional system allocates the fixed channel to a scalable video coding (SVC) signal. However, the proposed system allocates a high priority to the SVC signal channel.As a result of computer simulation tests, the proposed system can improve the BER performance compared to the conventional system.     

A reflective color STN-LCD with a single polarizer and double retardation films

Abstract— A reflective color STN-LCD with a single polarizer and double retardation films has been investigated. The double retardation films arranged in front of the LC layer enabled the LCD to contain reflective electrodes inside the panel. This configuration achieves a bright image with no parallax. A new construction of a reflective STN-LCD with a single polarizer has been developed by means of our own method in which the color difference ΔE* as the optimizing parameter has been used. Further, RGB color filters have been newly designed for our reflective LCD, and an aluminum (Al) layer has been introduced as a reflective electrode. As a result, we have realized a 7.8-in.-diagonal reflective color STN-LCD (640 × 480) which has 15% reflectance, 14:1 contrast ratio, 4096-color capability, and sufficient color gamut. It has been confirmed that the single-polarizer reflective color STN-LCD has sufficient performance for mobile business tools. We believe that it will be a key device for this application.     

Error probability analysis of an MC-DS-CDMA system under Weibull fading with a moment-generating function

The performance, with error probability analysis, of an MC-DS-CDMA (multi-carrier direct-sequence coded-division multiple-access) system adopting a Weibull fading channel is proposed and evaluated. On the basis of the multivariate MGF (moment-generating function) of Weibull statistics and an alternative expression of the Q-function, an approximate BER (bit-error rate) expression is derived for an MC-DS-CDMA system combined with MRC (maximal ratio-combining) diversity. The Weibull fading model is applied to analyze the BER performance of an MC-DS-CDMA system by considering multi-users with both multi-carriers and the phenomena of PBI (partial-band interference) cases. Regardless of the channel model assumed or the user number considered, it is noteworthy that the PBI is definitely the most important factor dominating the performance of an MC-DS-CDMA system, according to the results obtained in this study. The reliability of the proposed schemes can be explicitly verified in accordance with the previously reported results. Thus, we assert that the aim of the performance analysis of an MC-DS-CDMA system operating under Weibull fading has been completely achieved.     

基于瞬时无功功率的改进型谐波电流检测方法

三相瞬时无功功率理论,结合电机分析理论中的旋转坐标系思想(Park变换),改进了传统的i_p-i_q运算方式,把三相电流置于旋转坐标系中进行改进,进而提出了一种改进型谐波电流检测方法.新方法利用基波分量与谐波分量的不同特性,在旋转坐标系中对基波分量和谐波分量进行分离,求得谐波旋转分量,然后对分量进行反变换便可直接得到静止坐标系中需要检测的三相谐波电流.仿真结果表明,不论负载电流突变与否,改进型检测方法比传统方法的响应速度更快,检测精度更高.     

数字基带预失真系统中环路延迟估计的FPGA实现

基于FPGA芯片Stratix Ⅱ EP2S60F672C4设计实现了数字基带预失真系统中的环路延迟估计模块.该模块运用了一种环路延迟估计新方法,易于FPGA实现.同时,在信号失真的情况下也能给出正确的估计结果.Modelsim SE 6.5c的时序仿真结果和SignalTaps Ⅱ的硬件调试结果验证了模块的有效性.     

A new pixel design and a novel driving scheme for multi‐domain vertically aligned LCDs

Abstract— By using a new pixel design and a novel driving scheme that adds a bias electrode and a bias TFT to the ordinary pixel structure, a high‐contrast‐ratio and wide‐viewing‐angle LCD mode, refered to as the biased vertical‐alignment (BVA) mode, has been sucessfully developed. Compared to the published data on the PVA and MVA modes, the BVA mode has a distinct advantage of lower manufacturing cost due to the elimination of a lithographic process step that forms either ITO cuts or protrusions on the color‐filter substrates. The BVA mode requires ITO cuts on the TFT substrate similar to that for the PVA and MVA modes. The 15‐in. BVA‐mode XGA prototype exhibits a high contrast ratio of 1200:1 and high cell transmittance of 4.3%.     

Feature extraction using discrete cosine transform and discrimination power analysis with a face recognition technology

Discrete cosine transform (DCT) is a powerful transform to extract proper features for face recognition. After applying DCT to the entire face images, some of the coefficients are selected to construct feature vectors. Most of the conventional approaches select coefficients in a zigzag manner or by zonal masking. In some cases, the low-frequency coefficients are discarded in order to compensate illumination variations. Since the discrimination power of all the coefficients is not the same and some of them are discriminant than others, so we can achieve a higher true recognition rate by using discriminant coefficients (DCs) as feature vectors. Discrimination power analysis (DPA) is a statistical analysis based on the DCT coefficients properties and discrimination concept. It searches for the coefficients which have more power to discriminate different classes better than others. The proposed approach, against the conventional approaches, is data-dependent and is able to find DCs on each database. The simulations results of the various coefficient selection (CS) approaches on ORL and Yale databases confirm the success of the proposed approach. The DPA-based approaches achieve the performance of PCA/LDA or better with less complexity. The proposed method can be implemented for any feature selection problem as well as DCT coefficients. Also, a new modification of PCA and LDA is proposed namely, DPA-PCA and DPA-LDA. In these modifications DCs which are selected by DPA are used as the input of these transforms. Simulation results of DPA-PCA and DPA-LDA on the ORL and Yale database verify the improvement of the results by using these new modifications.     

改进的小波双阈值双因子函数去噪

针对传统的小波阈值函数在阈值处不连续、小波估计系数存在偏差等不足,导致去噪后的信号产生吉布斯振荡、失真和信噪比(SNR)无法提高等问题,提出了一种改进的小波阈值函数去噪方法。与传统的软、硬阈值和半软阈值等函数相比,该函数不仅在阈值处连续,便于运算处理,而且由于双阈值变量和双可变因子的引入,使得该函数既兼容了传统阈值函数的优点,还可以通过调节双阈值和双因子,来提高实际应用的灵活性。为了验证该阈值函数的优越性,通过仿真实验并对比几种小波去噪方法的信噪比和均方根误差,实验结果表明,经本阈值函数去噪后的信号在平滑度和失真度上有较大改善,相比软阈值函数,信噪比提高了22.2%,均方根误差减小了42.6%。     

高层次综合中基于整数线性规划模型的多目标功耗优化算法

考虑峰值周期功耗和峰值模块功耗的同时优化,并尽可能地降低电路的功耗时延乘积指标.利用参数化功能单元库中各个功能模块的具体物理信息,在多供电电压、多调度周期模式下,建立了整数线性规划模型及其相应的6组约束条件,并将高层次综合中的调度过程和功能单元的绑定过程统一起来进行了模型化.文中算法已经成功地应用到自行开发的高层次综合工具之中,算法中得到的数据结果可以直接用于下一步的布图规划.对测试用例的实验进一步说明:同时优化峰值周期功耗和峰值模块功耗可以取得更好的综合结果,并且改善功耗时延乘积项的值(平均降低了30%),提高电路的可靠性和稳定性.     

Evaluating sub-pixel functional defects of a display using an arbitrary resolution camera

An automatic optical inspection system to evaluate functional defects of sub-pixel elements in image displays is proposed, which is based on a single full-field imaging sensor. In order to circumvent sampling aliasing, the display is addressed with a set of grid patterns whose defocused optical images imitate a lower resolution display. The cross-talk between the sensor and the display primary colors is corrected by means of a linear transformation between their color-spaces. Dark and bright dots are located and quantified by applying a notch multi-band Fourier filter to the sensor images. The technique is simple, robust, and easily scalable, since only one image sensor is required, no moving parts are used, and the sensor can be reused to analyze increasing resolution displays.