Character LCD drivers

Character displays are the best choice for adding a display to show text instructions when using even a small microcontroller with limited ROM. When using a character LCD driver, for each character, it is necessary to just send the ASCII code and not a whole dot-matrix pattern of information.

NXP character drivers are low-power, CMOS LCD controllers and drivers, designed to drive LCD block character displays of 1 or 2 lines of up to 32 characters. NXP's character LCD drivers are unique in the industry because they can also drive icons and numbers in addition to rendering block characters. This key feature gives you the ability to display icons and numbers while the block character portion of the display is turned off, yielding tremendous power savings on the order of 5X. Instead of your display being blank and giving no user feedback or indication to the user, it can provide status such as a sleep indicator, a clock, battery or signal level, and more. NXP is the only manufacturer which allows you to do this without additional parts or cost, greatly improving the usability of your product.

NXP's character drivers provide all necessary functions to drive the display in a single chip, including on-chip generation of the higher LCD operational voltage with bias voltages and temperature compensation. This allows you to completely drive the LCD from the NXP character driver using only the on-board, logic-level voltages. This key feature, typically not found in competing products, results in a minimum of external components required and reduces system complexity.

Character LCD drivers contain a character generator to display alphanumeric and Kana (Japanese) characters. Different character sets are available and are indicated by the letter 'x' in the part number. These fixed character sets are stored in ROM, providing 240 usable characters of up to 5 x 8 size. Additionally, at run-time, via the interface bus, you can load an additional 16 characters into RAM, providing you with a total of 256 characters. Using these additional 16 characters, you can create larger, custom characters or fonts such a large caution or alarm signal. Combining these 16 characters can be used to represent full-graphic blocks with up to 640 total pixels. Another way to utilize the downloadable 16 characters is to create animation sequences, such as those to depict a battery charge or a directional flow. Finally, custom ROM character sets can be built on request.

NXP character LCD drivers are available with these important features:

NXP's leadership position in LCD drivers allows us to offer you products with high functionality and excellent pricing. This comes from our 30 years of experience in LCD drivers. Being a leader allows us to interface with demanding customers, leading to the most advanced and innovative products in the marketplace. Further, our expertise in ultra-low power analog watch motor drivers gives us insight into essential technology for portable electronics.

Unique to NXP, our character LCD drivers incorporate segment driver functionality. By including this capability, you can add icons, numbers, and starburst characters to the design without additional components, increasing the richness of the user interface. Further, by powering-down the generation of the LCD chararacters in "icon mode", power consumption is tremendously reduced.

Our character drivers include all the functions required to directly drive LCDs. This includes on-chip generation of the higher V_LCD operational voltage (with temperature compensation) and bias voltage generation. Further, by leveraging NXP's icon mode, you can eliminate an additional segment LCD driver from your design. Combining all these functions reduces cost and complexity and increases the flexibility of your design, allowing you to mount the LCD driver directly onto the LCD cell.

NXP's character drivers are very flexible. You can choose from a variety of different character ROM sets (indicated by the 'x' in the part numbers). Character sets include fixed 5 x 7 characters with separate cursor, fixed 5 x 8 characters/symbols including Kana (Japanese), and 16 user-defined symbols. Using multiple user-defined symbols, you can create larger text or symbols as well as animation sequences. Larger symbols and animation sequences are also included in many character ROM sets.

NXP offers operational modes to greatly reduce power consumption. Using icon mode, power is reduced from up to 200μA to typically 25μA. Going further into power-down mode, power is reduced to typically < 2μA.

Our character LCD drivers include a blink mode to indicate the current character or symbol is selected during user interaction. Shift mode allows characters to be inserted while other characters are shifted left or right. In shift mode, up to 80 characters are buffered into a display data RAM. This allows groups of characters to be loaded in the background reducing bus contention and processor requirements.

Alternatively, NXP's character LCD drivers support the use of an external V_LCD supply. By providing inputs for this voltage, our products will continue to generate the required LCD bias voltages. This gives you component cost savings even when using an external supply.

NXP's character LCD drivers provide a generous ROM of 240 characters. This ample character space includes alphabetic, numeric, punctuation, and symbol characters. Depending on the different character ROM sets, math and foreign language characters (Japanese Kana) are available. Also, the generous ROM space can include character sequences useful for animation.

In addition to a 1:18 multiplex rate used for normal operation of two lines, our character drivers support apaptive multiplex rates when fewer lines are used. In single-line operation, a multiplex rate of 1:9 can be used, maximizing the optical performance. When in icon mode, a multiplex rate 1:2 is used to provide further power savings using lower voltages.

NXP offers the flexibility of both the industry-standard I2C-bus and Intel 8-bit parallel bus interfaces.

In order to minimize required external components, NXP's LCD drivers include an on-chip oscillator. In some sensitive applications, designers prefer to have control over all the frequencies and harmonics in the system. In these cases, a specific frequency can be supplied by an external clock. For most applications, however, the internal clock is best to use.

Product	Lines	Columns	Icons	Interface	VDD	VLCD	Temperature Compensation	Package(s)
PCF2113x	2, 1	12, 24	120	400kHz I2C, Parallel	1.8 - 5.5	2.2 - 6.5	Yes	LQFP-100, Bare Die in FFC, Bare Die in Tray, Gold-Bumped Die in Tray
PCF2119x	2, 1	16, 32	160	400kHz I2C, Parallel	1.8 - 5.5	2.2 - 6.5	Yes	Gold-Bumped Die in Tray
PCF2116x	1, 2, 2, 4	24, 24, 12, 12	0	100kHz I2C, Parallel	2.5 - 6	3.5 - 9	External	Gold-Bumped Die in Tray, Bare Die in FFC, Gold-Bumped Die in FFC

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PCF2113x 2 x 12 character LCD controller and driver with I2C-bus and parallel interfaces, A/D/E/W character ROMs

PCF2116x 2 x 24 character LCD controller and driver with I2C-bus, A/C/G character ROMs

PCF2119x 2 x 16 character plus 160 icon LCD controller and driver with I2C-bus and parallel interfaces, A/D/F/R/S/V character ROMs

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