Display driver chip

Display driver chips connect the TV's circuit boards to the millions of wires on the panel's glass. Along the top or bottom edge of a bare LCD panel you'll see a row of thin, amber flexible strips, each carrying a long, slender chip. A TV has several to a dozen or more, depending on size and resolution.

The chip is a silicon die, made like other chips but shaped as a sliver often more than a centimeter long and only a millimeter or two wide, so hundreds or even thousands of outputs fit along its edges. Tiny bumps of gold plated onto its pads connect it face-down to fine copper leads on a flexible printed circuit; heat and pressure bond every bump at once. This is called chip-on-film (COF). One edge of the film is bonded to the panel glass with a conductive adhesive tape, and the other to a small board linked to the timing controller.

The LCD panel uses two kinds. Source drivers set the voltage on each column, which decides brightness. Gate drivers switch on one row at a time. In many modern TVs the gate drivers are built into the glass itself, leaving only source drivers as separate chips.