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EL Backlight

Hi All,

I am looking to backlight a small LCD. It is about watch size, about

0.5 square inches. I would like to use an EL backlight because it looks like they are more efficient then LED. I am power my device with a 3 volt CR1216. This is about a 20maH battery. There is not much power to spare.

Is anyone familiar with who manufactures EL drivers for a small display like this one?

I wonder if the watch manufactures do their own drivers or if they are using someone driver IC?

Thanks, James

Reply to
James
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It is very difficult to make EL backlight cost effective in such a small size. If you want efficiency, you can drive a watch size OLED screen for approximately 5mA full screen. A typical display could be

20% to 50% or 1mA to 2.5mA effective.

Which manufacturer? There are standard driver ICs for both LCD and OLED displays.

Reply to
linnix

You should certainly avoi LEDs. I once used a much larger coin cell, CR2012 I think, to power an instrument. It was the largest coin cell I could find which was dual-sourced, and was based on LiMnO2 chemistry. All went well at first, but then we found that it could not power our piezo alarm sounder and very efficient alarm LED's for very long. Basically these cells may be rated at 200mAhr or whatever - but if you take more than about 20mA (I forget exactly how much current we were using) their internal resistance rises within a few minutes.

We had to move to a larger, cylindrical battery. Could you use something like a CR2 size cell?

--
Nemo
Reply to
Nemo

Nemo, I am using a CR1216 and I have found similar things with this battery. I am driving a micro and the internal resistance is large enough that there is a lot of noise on the battery line. I pull about

2ma and I think that this is quite a bit for this battery. James
Reply to
James

I will take a look at OLED backlights. It would be great if I could get the backlight done for under 5ma. I was under the impression that OLED's were primarily used for higher resolution displays. I am using a cheap 4 digit 7 segment LCD display. One reason that I am interested in an EL backlight is that I did not want to add much thickness.

I have looked at supertex for EL drivers and I was asking if there are other EL driver manufactures that I should look at? What about OLED drivers, is there a leading manufacture?

Thanks, James

Reply to
James

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