Design and optimization of a reconfigurable power delivery network for large-area, DVS-enabled OLED displays

Abstract

Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) has proven effective in minimizing the power consumption of OLED displays, resulting only in minimal image distortion. This technique has been extended to perform zone-specific DVS by dividing the panel area into zones and applying independent DVS to each zone based on the displayed content. The application of the latter technique to large-area OLED displays has not been done in part due to a high overhead of its dedicated DC-DC converter for each zone and low conversion efficiency when the load current of each converter lies outside the desirable range. To address this issue, this work proposes a reconfigurable power delivery network architecture, comprised of a small number of DC-DC converters, a switch network and an online controller, to realize fine-grained (zone-specific) DVS in large-area OLED display panels. The proposed framework consistently achieves high power conversion efficiency and significant energy saving while preserving the image quality. Experimental results demonstrate that up to 36% power savings can be achieved in a 65" 4K Ultra high-definition OLED display by using the proposed framework.