Display Power Optimizer (DPO)

Display Power Optimizer (DPO) − Dramatically Lowers Display Power Consumption in Mobile Devices

Today's newest and most advanced mobile devices require their displays to be powered on whenever in use. That leads to a significant system design issue: how to extend battery life? The problem won't go away any time soon, either. As illustrated in Figure 1, an analysis from IMS Research shows that Smartphone battery requirements are outpacing battery capacity well into the future.

The Mobile Handset Power Gap: Heavy Smartphone User

Smartphone battery Capacity vs. Power Requirements for Heavy Users (Source:IMS Research Sep-09)

As displays typically consume 30-60% of the total system power, there has been a tremendous amount of research put into methods of reducing display power. A common method, such as Content Adaptive Backlight Control (CABC), reduces backlight or brightness levels to save power. However, CABC significantly diminishes the viewing experience of content details, particularly in darker content--while CABC will save battery life (on the order of 10%), it also greatly reduces detail, damaging the viewing experience.

QuickLogic's DPO technology are a radical advancement from primitive CABC technology. DPO takes the idea of being content-aware two further steps by evaluating the value of each individual pixel and the statistics of the all the nearby pixels. While VEE uses that information to adjust the value of the individual pixels, DPO adjusts the display backlight or power to best match the viewing environment.

Depending on the use case, system designers can expect single-charge battery life extentions of up to 25% or more using QuickLogic's DPO technology.