1080p LCD Driver Board

This board was designed to demonstrate my current employer's DTV chip at CES in January of 2006.  It's purpose was to convert a DVI signal to LVDS and act as a stand-a-lone raw panel controller that would supply the data and control signals to power on the LCD and backlight. The panel used was a Samsung 46" 1080p (60Hz 8bit). It would accept DVI input and would output LVDS in the format required by the panel.

Most LVDS drivers support up to a 95MHz input clock (some newer ones up to 105MHz). The input data is then serialized and is output at a rate of 7x the clock. This means that for every input clock, 7 bits of data would be transmitted per channel.

Diagram of LVDS Driver Outputs for 8-bit JETDA Colour Format

Since there is a restriction on how fast the drivers can be clocked, achieving 148.5MHz (1080p, 60Hz, 8-bit) can be done be separating the odd and even pixels and sending the data separately using two drivers. Each driver would then effectively be transmitting at half the rate, or 74.25MHz.

The board consisted on a Silicon Image HDMI Receiver, two Thine LVDS transmitters, and an Atmel AVR microcontroller. The Silicon Image chip would convert decode the data and pass it along to the two Thine LVDS transmitters. The microcontroller was used to setup the turn-on sequence for the panel, and to program features in the Silicon Image chip using I2C. This board (and code for the microcontroller) was designed and assembled in four days in order to meet the trade show deadline.

Picture of the 1080p Raw Panel Driver Board

Pictures of the native 1080p panel being driven by the board

September 6th, 2007