Designing a display unit to drive the 8×8 LED dot-matrix displays

This paper presents a field programmable gate array (FPGA) prototype of a display unit to drive the eight-by-eight LED dot-matrix displays of two colors. The circuit design was Verilog-based and downloaded to the Spartan-3 FPGA chip of the Spartan-3 Starter Board. The display unit was able to generate four character patterns to rotate in four directions successfully. The design itself suggests a wide variety of the small-sized display application domains with a single red-green eight-by-eight LED dot-matrix display.