Driver ICs for Dot Matrix LED Display

Depends on whether the display is multiplexed or not, or whether you have individual access to all the anodes and cathodes of the leds.......

Is it just one display of one charactor you need with the number of charactors being one of 13 variants?

John.

You may be able to create the driver in the 8051 as a routine among the other things you are doing. It has enough pins to drive rows and columns in task 1 and task 2 etc etc.

as for more.

follow these links,'

http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=%22dot+matrix%22+%2B%22display+driver%22&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

Allegro Microsystems, Inc. 5820, 5821... They have every configuration imaginable. Serial, parallel, high voltage. Search for their page or on a distributor like Newark or DigiKey.

Toshiba makes LED drivers for this exact purpose. Marktech is the distributor (I dealt with the NY sales office). I have designed numerous products with these 8 output and 16 output drivers--moving message marquis, scoreboards, fitness trainer timers, countdown clocks, etc. You need 4 output pins to do the job: Clock, Data, Latch and Enable. These constitute the "LED bus". The clock can go up to 2MHz on some drivers and higher on others. Each driver would handle a column (for example) of your dot matrix message. You drive the LEDs with a common anode approach. The drivers are sinking current (open collector) and there is a programming pin to which you can connect a resistor to control the amount of current going through the LED(s). This way you do not need to use a current limiting resistors in each LED circuit and your LEDs will have a nice, consistent brightness. Connect a PWM output to Enable and you can dynamically control the brightness of your entire LED display via software control.

You simply conect serial-out of one driver to serial-in of the next driver. You do this again and again. I've made strings of drivers this way. I use some tricks to make them really long.

You'll also need to do serial "bit banging", use some data lookup tables, etc.

Look at www.allegromicro.com/ and they make many types of LED driver ICs.

You can also use Latch and transistors to drive the LEDs.

I know, where it is possible to buy inexpensive in comparison with others LED Display .