Digital‐to‐analog converter with gamma correction on glass substrate for TFT‐panel applications

Abstract— Low‐temperature polysilicon (LTPS) technology has a tendency towards integrating all circuits on glass substrate. However, the poly‐Si TFTs suffered poor uniformity with large variations in the device characteristics due to a narrow laser process window for producing large‐grained poly‐Si TFTs. The device variation is a serious problem for circuit realization on the LCD panel, so how to design reliable on‐panel circuits is a challenge for system‐on‐panel (SOP) applications. In this work, a 6‐bit R‐string digital‐to‐analog converter (DAC) with gamma correction on glass substrate for TFT‐panel applications is proposed. The proposed circuit, which is composed of a folded R‐string circuit, a segmented digital decoder, and reordering of the decoding circuit, has been designed and fabricated in a 3‐μm LTPS technology. The area of the new proposed DAC circuit is effectively reduced to about one‐sixth compared to that of the conventional circuit for the same LTPS process.