Local Dimming of automotive displays implemented on FPGA

Objective: the automotive displays is a very demanding application for local dimming, while the advantages are also huge. Under sunlight, the display must be very bright so that beside the power consumption the heat dissipation is a serious problem requiring heavy and large heat sink. In the night operation, the ambient is dark so that the LCD panel appears rather grey. Such a grey appearance makes the interior design less convenient. Local dimming may drastically enhance the black level and make the interior deisgn much more classy. The major challenge is that the image is often of graphic content so that the uniformity requirement is high, especially for the night operation. Therefore few modes for diverse ambient conditions are to be considered. For the sunshine the power saving is the absolute priority, while compromise at image quality may be accepted. For the night operation, image quality like black level outperforms the power saving. For this purpose, the correlation between the image and the backlight distribution is a further metrics to be optimized. Since FPGA is chosen as the HW, the implementation may be easily modified. User tests and few iterations are planned to get the best trade-off for each mode. A user test is planned.