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Display Technolgy mainly consists of two things: Display Devices and Display Driver Integrated Chips(DDIC).

Display Devices: are OLED, LCD, LED, CRT, Vacuum Florescent, etc modules. To know in-depth about the different types of display devices refer to this.

Display Driver Integrated Chips(DDIC): are semiconductor IC\’s that provide an interface between the control Unit(MPU and MCU) and a particular type of display device. Display driver accepts commands and data using onboard communication protocols like I2C, SPI, CMOS, RS232, etc and generates signals with suitable voltage, current, timing, and demultiplexing to make the display show the desired text or image. Display driver IC\’s may also incorporate RAM, Flash Memory, EEPROM, and/or ROM. Examples of Display Driver IC are SSD1306, HD44780, KS0108, SSD1815, and ST7920.

In this blog, we are going to use the OLED Display device and will go in-depth into one of the OLED Display Driver IC\’s: SSD1306 by Solomon Systech.

OLED Display Introduction

OLED(Organic Light Emitting Diode) displays are the new technology in the display screen industry that are revolutionizing the user interface for users in various devices like TV screens, Virtual Reality headsets, Smart Watches, and many more.

LCD Technology is compentator to OLED technology. LCD is a non-emission and older display technology that requires an external light source to work. While OLED technology is modern and considered to be emission display technology, that does not require a backlight that is an external light source.

OLED Display technology is pretty exciting and opens lots of possibilities:

1. Curved OLED Display
2. Wearable OLED\’s
3. Flexible and rollable OLED
4. Transparent OLED embedded in Windows
5. and many more we can not imagine today.

The focus of this blog will be more on the understanding of OLED Display Driver IC: SSD1306 and its driver development for operating the below OLED Screen Module.

To get to know about the OLED display working and its layers, readers can refer to this blog.

OLED Driver IC\’s apart from SSD1306 are SSD0323.

SSD1306 OLED Driver IC

SSd1306 is an integrated chip that is used to drive the OLED display of the dot-matrix graphic display system. These IC\’s comes in Chip on glass or Chip on Film packaging i.e chip die is directly mounted to a piece of the glass display.

SSD1306 has a feature to drive up to 128 columns & 64 rows of OLED pixels. It has constant control, display RAM and oscillator inbuilt which reduces the external components and power consumption.

SSD1306 IC itself require only 1.65 to 3.3 V that can be provided to it easily from MCU. But as OLED displays does not have backlight as LCD has, so the panel of OLED requires higher voltages of about 7-15 V which is supplied to OLED panel from internal voltage doublers and charge pump circuitry\’s. And on an average OLED display consumes only 20mA current.

Now coming to the part that how does these Driver IC display data on these OLED screens.