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Why Does TLC5940 LED Driver Produces "Smearing Edges"?

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Darkwing:
Hi folks!

I have a technical question about the (supposed) misbehavior of a TLC5940 LED driver chip, producing "smearing edges" at its outputs.

The Story
I'm trying to multiplex some segment displays. Multiplexing is done with shift registers (CD74HTC4094) and a source driver stage (MIC2981), because the displays are common anode. As current sink driver I'm using the 16ch TLC5940 LED driver chip.

The Problem
I was wondering why I have some ghosting on the display digits, that means: some segments of one digit lit up shortly on the next digit. After thorough inspection, I found out, that the TLC5940 itself outputs some kind of "smearing edges", like it is somehow oscillating in timing. I measured that this "oscillation range" is about 1ms wide.

Here is a picture from the scope:


1, 2: edges from the multiplexing source driver
3, 4: some segment pins from the TLC5940

Also here is a Youtube video of this in action:



You can see, that the edges are "moving".


This behavior is very unfortunate because it prevents me from multiplexing very quickly — because I need to "wait" around 1ms (=1.000µs = 1.000.000ns !) to be safe to switch to the next digit.

I understand that there is a propagation delay with 16 bits shifting into the TLC5940 registers – but reading the switching characteristics in the datasheet, I don't see why this delay should sum up to 1.000.000ns; it should be 500ns or maybe 3.000ns ...  :o (I'm also shifting 16 bits to the shift registers and the source driver respectively – this also produces clean, non-moving edges. So the crux must be the TLC5940.)




The Question
Does anyone know why the outputs are "oscillating" in such a way? Is there a remedy to this or is this normal behavior of this chip?  :-//

Btw, here is a view of the breadboard, that you can get an idea of how it all looks like:




Hoping for help!
Thanks y'all!  :)

edavid:
Where are the decoupling capacitors?

Darkwing:
Thanks for reply!

I tried 0.1uF on several places ... they don't make any difference at all.  :-//

james_s:
Between the long wires on a solderless breadboard without any decoupling I'm actually kind of amazed that it works as well as it does.

Ian.M:
If you don't pulse BLANK while loading (not shifting in) the new data to reset the PWM counters, I would expect 4096/30MHz = 1.37ms of XLAT to LED output propagation delay jitter as your load event isn't (and cant be) synchronised to the free-running PWM cycle.

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