OLED Electrical Equivalent Device for Driver Topology Design

In this paper, a hardware equivalent of an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) was designed and investigated. This substitution OLED device is based on a circuit-equivalent OLED model and can be used to design and test OLED dedicated drivers. Indeed, OLEDs are available on the market, but they are still very expensive and hard to obtain. Compared to a real OLED, the substitution device is cheap and robust and can be easily duplicated. Moreover, a photodetector is not required to measure the light output waveform. This can be simply done by measuring a voltage across a resistance. This model can be used, for instance, to simulate a large OLED panel made of several associated single OLEDs for various series/parallel connection strategies. It can also be used to simulate aging phenomena by changing the values of some of its components. This might be useful for the definition of strategies to compensate aging effects like luminous flux depreciation. Another advantage of such a device is its use for power supply tests as it could serve as a substitution load, at maximum deviation from standard OLED electrical characteristics. We discuss the theoretical model that was used as a basis for developing the device. The accuracy of the model was then evaluated, particularly in pulsewidth-modulation dimming conditions. Then, the hardware equivalent device was compared to a real OLED. Finally, an example of the potential use of this substitution device is given: It was successfully used to investigate the “overdrive” technique in order to increase OLED light output rise time. This technique improves the light output rise time by a factor of over 4.