PCF8537
Industrial LCD driver for multiplex rates up to 1:8
Rev. 1 — 31 May 2012
Product data sheet
1. General description
The PCF8537 is a fully featured Liquid Crystal Display (LCD)1 driver, specifically designed
for high-contrast Vertical Alignment (VA) LCD with multiplex rates up to 1:8. It generates
the drive signals for any static or multiplexed LCD containing up to eight backplanes,
46 segments, and up to 352 elements. The PCF8537 features an internal charge pump
with internal capacitors for on-chip generation of the LCD driving voltage. To ensure an
optimal and stable contrast over the full temperature range, the PCF8537 offers a
programmable temperature compensation of the LCD supply voltage. The PCF8537 can
be easily connected to a microcontroller by either the two-line I2C-bus (PCF8537AH) or a
three-line bidirectional SPI-bus (PCF8537BH).
2. Features and benefits
Low-power single-chip LCD controller and driver
352 elements allowing to drive:
up to 44 7-segment alphanumeric characters
up to 22 14-segment alphanumeric characters
Selectable backplane drive configuration: static, 2, 4, 6, or 8 backplane multiplexing
Software programmable internal charge pump for on-chip LCD voltage generation up
to 9 V with internal capacitors
400 kHz I2C-bus interface (PCF8537AH)
5 MHz SPI-bus interface (PCF8537BH)
Programmable temperature compensation of VLCD in four regions
Selectable display bias configuration
Wide range for digital power supply: from 1.8 V to 5.5 V
Wide LCD supply range: from 2.5 V for low threshold LCDs and up to 9.0 V for high
threshold twisted nematic LCDs
Display memory bank switching in static, duplex, and quadruplex drive modes
352-bit RAM for display data storage
Programmable frame frequency in the range of 60 Hz to 300 Hz in steps of 10 Hz;
factory calibrated
Integrated temperature sensor with temperature readout
On chip calibration of internal oscillator frequency and VLCD
Manufactured in silicon gate CMOS process
1. The definition of the abbreviations and acronyms used in this data sheet can be found in Section 17.